and more as he
would have him look on them. Add to this, that they had been in the
business together almost from boyhood, and much will be explained.

An open carriage, with a pair of showy but ill-matched horses, looking
unfit for country work on the one hand, as for Hyde Park on the other,
drew up at the door; and a visible wave of interest ran from end to end
of the shop, swaying as well those outside as those inside the counter,
for the carriage was well known in Testbridge. It was that of Lady
Margaret Mortimer; she did not herself like the _Margaret_, and signed
only her second name _Alice_ at full length, whence her _friends_
generally called her to each other Lady Malice. She did not leave the
carriage, but continued to recline motionless in it, at an angle of
forty-five degrees, wrapped in furs, for the day was cloudy and cold,
her pale handsome face looking inexpressibly more indifferent in its
regard of earth and sky and the goings of men, than that of a corpse
whose gaze is only on the inside of the coffin-lid. But the two ladies
who were with her got down. One of them was her daughter, Hesper by
name, who, from the dull, cloudy atmosphere that filled the doorway,
entered the shop like a gleam of sunshine, dusky-golden, followed by a
glowing shadow, in the person of her cousin, Miss Yolland.

Turnbull hurried to meet them, bowing profoundly, and looking very much
like Issachar between the chairs he carried. But they turned aside to
where Mary stood, and in a few minutes the counter was covered with
various stuffs for some of the smaller articles of ladies' attire.

The customers were hard to please, for they wanted the best things at
the price of inferior ones, and Mary noted that the desires of the
cousin were farther reaching and more expensive than those of Miss
Mortimer. But, though in this way hard to please, they were not
therefore unpleasant to deal with; and from the moment she looked the
latter in the face, whom she had not seen since she was a girl, Mary
could hardly take her eyes off her. All at once it struck her how well
the unusual, fantastic name her mother had given her suited her; and,
as she gazed, the feeling grew.

Large, and grandly made, Hesper stood "straight, and steady, and tall,"
dusky-fair, and colorless, with the carriage of a young matron. Her
brown hair seemed ever scathed and crinkled afresh by the ethereal
flame that here and there peeped from amid the unwilling volute roll