y, who had gracefully taken
flight from "horrid business," returned in an evening dress and with
a sweetly smiling countenance, and very nearly turned the Jellicorsian
head, snowy as it was, with soft attentions and delicious deference.

"I was treated like a prince," he said next day, when delivered safe at
home, and resting among his rather dingy household gods. "There never
could have been a more absurd idea than that notion of yours about my
being put into wet sheets, Diana. Why, I even had my night-cap warmed;
and a young woman came, with a blush upon her face, and a question
whether I would be pleased to sleep in a gross of Naples stockings! Ah,
to my mind, after all, it proves what I have always said--that there is
nothing like old blood."

"Nothing like old blood for being made a fool of," his wife replied,
with a coarseness which made him shiver, after Mrs. Carnaby. "They know
what they are about, I'll lay a penny. Some roguery, no doubt, that they
seek to lead you into. That is what their night-caps and stockings mean.
How low it is to make a foreground of them!"

"Hush, my dear! I can not bear such want of charity. And what is even
worse, you expose me to an action at law, with heavy damages."

The lawyer had sundry little qualms of conscience, which were deepened
by his wife's sagacious words; and suddenly it struck him that the
new-fangled vehicle which had brought him home so quietly from Scargate
had shown a strange inability to stand still for more than two minutes
at his side door. So much had he been hurried by the apparent straits of
his charioteer that he ran out with box C without ever stopping to make
an inventory of its contents--as he intended to do--or even looking
whether the all-important deed was there. In fact, he had scarcely time
to seal up the key in a separate package, hand it to Jordas, and take
the order (now become a receipt) from the horny fist of the dogman,
before Marmaduke, rendered more dashing by snow-drift, was away like a
thunder-bolt--if such a thing there be, and if it has four legs.

"How could I have helped doing as I have done?" he whispered to himself,
uncomfortably. "Here are two ladies of high position, and they send a
joint order for their property. By-the-bye, I will just have a look at
that order, now that there is no horse to jump over me." Upon going to
the day file, he found the order right, transcribed from his own amended
copy, and bearing two signatures, a