and the
tippets of pheasants' tails.

She was a woman of about five-and-twenty; but her beauty, though still
in its prime, showed the wear and tear of years. Had it not been that
its chief power lay in the intellect and goodness which sat on the
capacious but not cloudy brow, and gleamed out of the cordial dark
blue eyes, and hovered round the somewhat wide and somewhat lined but
never sensual mouth--you would have said this was a faded queen whom
the world was mad to worship. As it was, she did look faded this
spring afternoon, and occasionally fretted audibly enough as she
turned over the leaves of her volumes, and sighed "heigho!" as she
looked at her repeater--not quite so common an appendage as the little
Geneva story-tellers, though a footpad carried always a goodly supply,
and a gentleman's gentleman of very fine prestige would wear a couple,
"one in each fob"--and sipped her tea; which, by the way, she drank,
not out of one of the diminutive China cups, but out of an old
battered, but very shining little silver tankard.

Anon my lady rose and strolled to a back window. She looked across the
noisy, crowded stable-yard into the corner of a garden, where a lilac
bush was budding into dusty dim purple and a hoary apple-tree blossomed
white and pink like a blushing child, away over the green fields to a
farmhouse upon a hill, where russet and yellow stacks proved the
farmer's command of ready money, or caution in selling. From just such
another farmhouse as that on which our bright benevolent woman--even in
the dumps--was gazing wistfully, issued Caroline Inchbald, a beauty, and
a generous, virtuous woman under great temptations, a friend and rival
on equal terms with Amelia Opie.

But hark! an arrival in the next room: fresh guests--country people of
consequence, for they were ushered in by Mrs. Price herself, who
received in person their orders for an incongruous meal, neither dinner
nor supper, to recruit them for some gala in which they had the prospect
of figuring, to judge from a torrent of exclamations which pierced
through a convenient cupboard in the partition.

"Make haste, girls," in bass tones.

"Eat away, Fiddy," in treble, mimicking the bass.

"Uncle, don't attempt the game-pie. We'll be too late, as sure as our
heads. Didn't you hear Mrs. Price say there was a power of company
wanting seats; it would be too bad if we lost the sight after all."

"What, Prissy, worse than Admiral Byng's defeat,