u and me!" laughed Peter.

"I'm going home to my bed. I've earned my rest," Lady Agnes sighed.

"Can't Peter take _us_?" demanded Grace. "Nick can take you home, mamma,
if Julia won't receive him, and I can look perfectly after Peter and
Biddy."

"Take them to something amusing; please take them," Mrs. Dallow said to
her brother. Her voice was kind, but had the expectation of assent in
it, and Nick observed both the good nature and the pressure. "You're
tired, poor dear," she continued to Lady Agnes. "Fancy your being
dragged about so! What did you come over for?"

"My mother came because I brought her," Nick said. "It's I who have
dragged her about. I brought her for a little change. I thought it would
do her good. I wanted to see the Salon."

"It isn't a bad time. I've a carriage and you must use it; you must use
nothing else. It shall take you everywhere. I'll drive you about
to-morrow." Julia dropped these words with all her air of being able
rather than of wanting; but Nick had already noted, and he noted now
afresh and with pleasure, that her lack of unction interfered not a bit
with her always acting. It was quite sufficiently manifest to him that
for the rest of the time she might be near his mother she would do for
her numberless good turns. She would give things to the girls--he had a
private adumbration of that; expensive Parisian, perhaps not perfectly
useful, things.

Lady Agnes was a woman who measured outlays and returns, but she was
both too acute and too just not to recognise the scantest offer from
which an advantage could proceed. "Dear Julia!" she exclaimed
responsively; and her tone made this brevity of acknowledgment adequate.
Julia's own few words were all she wanted. "It's so interesting about
Harsh," she added. "We're immensely excited."

"Yes, Nick looks it. _Merci, pas de vin_. It's just the thing for you,
you know," Julia said to him.

"To be sure he knows it. He's immensely grateful. It's really very kind
of you."

"You do me a very great honour, Julia," Nick hastened to add.

"Don't be tiresome, please," that lady returned.

"We'll talk about it later. Of course there are lots of points," Nick
pursued. "At present let's be purely convivial. Somehow Harsh is such a
false note here. _Nous causerons de ca_."

"My dear fellow, you've caught exactly the tone of Mr. Gabriel Nash,"
Peter Sherringham declared on this.

"Who's Mr. Gabriel Nash?" Mrs. Dallow asked.

"Nick, is he a g