esh cigar, and
pushing the box towards me.

* * * * *

I will leave you to imagine the lad's suddenly developed appetite for
decantered sherry at sixpence a glass, and the familiar currant bun of
our youth. He lunched at Sewell's shop, he tea'd at Sewell's,
occasionally he dined at Sewell's, off cutlets, followed by assorted
pastry. Possibly, merely from fear lest the affair should reach his
mother's ears, for he was neither worldly-wise nor vicious, he made love
to Mary under an assumed name; and to do the girl justice, it must be
remembered that she fell in love with and agreed to marry plain Mr. John
Robinson, son of a colonial merchant, a gentleman, as she must have seen,
and a young man of easy means, but of a position not so very much
superior to her own. The first intimation she received that her lover
was none other than Lord C---, the future Earl of ---, was vouchsafed her
during a painful interview with his lordship's mother.

"I never knew it, madam," asserted Mary, standing by the window of the
drawing-room above the shop, "upon my word of honour, I never knew it."

"Perhaps not," answered her ladyship coldly. "Would you have refused him
if you had?"

"I cannot tell," was the girl's answer; "it would have been different
from the beginning. He courted me and asked me to be his wife."

"We won't go into all that," interrupted the other; "I am not here to
defend him. I do not say he acted well. The question is, how much will
compensate you for your natural disappointment?"

Her ladyship prided herself upon her bluntness and practicability. As
she spoke she took her cheque-book out of her reticule, and, opening it,
dipped her pen into the ink. I am inclined to think that the flutter of
that cheque-book was her ladyship's mistake. The girl had common sense,
and must have seen the difficulties in the way of a marriage between the
heir to an earldom and a linen-draper's daughter; and had the old lady
been a person of discernment, the interview might have ended more to her
satisfaction. She made the error of judging the world by one standard,
forgetting there are individualities. Mary Sewell came from a West of
England stock that, in the days of Drake and Frobisher, had given more
than one able-bodied pirate to the service of the country, and that
insult of the cheque-book put the fight into her. Her lips closed with a
little snap, and the fear fell from her.

"I am sorry I don't see my way to