re, and I ask you and Helen to keep watch. Don't let
her go. Make yourselves nice to her; and, in fact, spoil me a little now
I am on the high rode to forty, as you used to spoil me at fourteen.'

Mr. Flaxman sat down by his aunt and kissed her hand, after which Lady
Charlotte was as wax before him. 'Thank heaven,' she reflected, 'in ten
days the Duke and all of them go out of town.' Retribution, therefore,
for wrong-doing would be, tardy, if wrongdoing there must be. She could
but ruefully reflect that after all the girl was beautiful and gifted;
moreover, if Hugh would force her to befriend him in this criminality,
there might be a certain joy in thereby vindicating those Liberal
principles of hers, in which a scornful family had always refused to
believe. So, being driven into it, she would fain have done it boldly
and with a dash. But she could not rid her mind of the Duke, and her
performance all through, as a matter of fact, was blundering.

However, she was for the time very gracious to Rose, being in truth,
really fond of her; and Rose, however high she might hold her little
head, could find no excuse for quarrelling either with her or Lady
Helen.

Toward the middle of June there was a grand ball given by Lady
Fauntleroy at Fauntleroy House, to which the two Miss Leyburns, by Lady
Helen's machinations, were invited. It was to be one, of the events of
the season, and when the cards arrived 'to have the honor of meeting
their Royal Highnesses,' etc., etc., Mrs. Leyburn, good soul, gazed
at them with eyes which grew a little moist under her spectacles. She
wished Richard could have seen the girls, dressed, 'just once.' But Rose
treated the cards with no sort of tenderness. 'If one could put them
up to auction,' she said flippantly, holding them up, 'how many German
opera tickets I should get for nothing! I don't know what Agnes feels.
As for me, I have neither nerve enough for the peoples nor money enough
for the toilette.'

However, with eleven o'clock Lady Helen ran in, a fresh vision of blue
and white, to suggest certain dresses for the sisters which had occurred
to her in the visions of the night, 'original, adorable,--cost, a mere
nothing!'

'My harpy,' she remarked, alluding to her dressmaker, 'would ruin you
over them, of course. Your maid'--the Leyburns possessed a remarkably
clever one--'will make them divinely for twopence half-penny. Listen.'

Rose listened; her eye kindled; the maid was summoned;