nt Estelle came up to him.

"Is it not a change for no Nina to be in the theatre? But there is one
that is glad--oh, very glad! Miss Burgoyne rejoices!"--and Estelle, as
she passed on, made use of a phrase in French, which, perhaps
fortunately, he did not understand.

After the performance, he went up to the Garden Club--he did not care to
go home to his own rooms and sit thinking. And the first person he saw
after he passed into the long coffee-room was Octavius Quirk, who was
seated all by himself devouring a Gargantuan supper.

"This is luck," Lionel said to himself. "Maurice's Jabberwock will begin
with his blatherskite nonsense--it will be something to pass the time."

But on the contrary, as it turned out, the short, fat man with the
unwholesome complexion was not at this moment in the humor for frothy
and windy invective about nothing; perhaps the abundant supper had
mollified him; he was quite suave.

"Ah, Moore," said he, "haven't seen you since you came back from
Scotland. It was awfully kind of Lady Adela to send me a haunch of
venison."

"It would serve you for one meal, I suppose," Lionel thought; he did not
say so.

"I dine with them to-morrow night," continued Mr. Quirk, complacently.

"Oh, indeed," said Lionel? Lady Adela seemed rather in a hurry,
immediately on her return to town, to secure her tame critic.

"Very good dinners they give you up there at Campden Hill,"
Mr. Quirk resumed, as he took out a big cigar from his case.
"Excellent--excellent--and the people very well chosen, too, if it
weren't for that loathsome brute, Quincey Hooper. Why do they tolerate a
fellow like that--the meanest lick-spittle and boot-blacker to any
Englishman who has got a handle to his name, while all the time he is
writing in his wretched Philadelphia rag every girding thing he can
think of against England. Comparison, comparison, continually--and far
more venomous than the foolish, feeble sort of stuff which is only
Anglophobia and water; and yet Hooper hasn't the courage to speak out
either--it's a morbid envy of England that is afraid to declare itself
openly and can only deal in hints and innuendoes. What can Lady Adela
see in a fellow like that? Of course he writes puffing paragraphs about
her and sends them to her; but what good are they to her, coming from
America? She wants to be recognized as a clever woman by her own set.
She appeals to the _dii majorum gentium_; what does she care for the
verdict o