med to failure, since whatever his
intentions--Henrietta smiled wisely--they certainly did not include Maud
Callowgas's matrimonial future in their purview.

Herbert Binning followed next--the chaplain who served the rather staring
little Anglican church at Le Vandou, a suburb of St. Augustin much
patronized by the English in the winter season, and a chapel somewhere in
the Bernese Oberland during the summer months. Energetic, athletic, a
great talker and squire of dames--in all honesty and correctness, this
last, well understood, for there wasn't a word to be breathed against the
good cleric's morals. But just a wee bit impressionable and flirtatious,
as who might not very well be with such a whiney-piney wife as Mrs.
Binning, always ailing; what mind she might (by stretch of charity) be
supposed to possess exclusively fixed upon the chronic irregularities of
her internal organs? Recumbency was a mania with her and she had a
disconcerting habit of wanting to lie down on the most inconveniently
unsuitable occasions.--To mitigate his over-flowing energies, which cried
aloud for work, Mr. Binning took pupils. He had two exceptionably nice
boys with him this winter, in the interval between leaving Eton and going
up to Oxford, namely, Peregrine Ditton, Lord Pamber's younger son, and
Harry Ellice, a nephew of Lady Hermione Twells. They were very well-bred.
Their high spirits were highly infectious. They played tennis to
perfection and Harry Ellice danced quite tidily into the
bargain.--Damaris must make friends with them. They were her
contemporaries, and delightfully fresh and ingenuous.

Lady Hermione herself--here Henrietta's tone conveyed restraint, even
comparative reverence--who never for an instant forgot she once had
reigned over some microscopic court out in the far Colonial
wilderness, nor allowed you to forget it either. Her glance half
demanded your curtsy. Still she was the "real thing" and, in that,
eminently satisfactory--genuine _grande dame_ by right both of birth
and of training.

"She won't condescend to tell me so, being resolved to keep me very much
in my proper place," Henrietta continued; "but I learned yesterday from
Mary Ellice--Harry's sister, who lives with her--that she is intensely
desirous to meet Sir Charles. She wants to talk to him about Afghanistan
and North-west Frontier policy. A brother of hers it appears was at one
time in the Guides; and she is under the impression your father and
Co