last charade."

"Oh, I hope you don't really think so, Lady Mary," cried Sylla; "but you
cannot half act a thing. When the exigencies of the stage require one to
be embraced, one must admit of that ceremony. Surely if a girl has
scruples about going through such a mere form, she had much better
decline to act at once."

"That's a question that we will not argue," said Lady Mary. "I hear you
are going to stay with Mrs. Wriothesley for the remainder of the London
season."

"Yes, she is an aunt of mine; you know her, I believe."

"Very well; we are old friends, although I don't see so much of her as I
once did. The London world has got so very big, you see, and Mrs.
Wriothesley and I have drifted into different sets."

"Yes," chimed in Pansey Cottrell, who was standing by, "it has got
perfectly unendurable. One could calculate at one time upon seeing a
good deal of one's friends during the season; now half of them we only
come across some once or twice. But surely you and Mrs. Wriothesley see
a good deal of each other."

"No, not in these days," rejoined Lady Mary, tartly, much to Mr.
Cottrell's amusement.

He knew perfectly well that the two ladies met continually, although
there was little cordiality between them. But Lady Mary's last speech
showed him she intended to keep Mrs. Wriothesley at arms' length, if
possible, for the future; and Pansey Cottrell smiled as he thought that
his hostess's schemes would, in all likelihood, be as persistently
thwarted in town as they had been in the country.

"Well, I trust that Blanche and I will contrive to see a good bit of each
other all the same," replied Sylla courteously. "You know my aunt,
Captain Bloxam," she continued, as she moved away. "I should have
thought her an easy person to get on with; but I am afraid Lady Mary does
not like her."

CHAPTER VIII.

MRS. WRIOTHESLEY.

When Ralph Wriothesley of the Household Cavalry, better known among his
intimates as the "Rip," married pretty Miss Lewson, niece of that
worldly and bitter-tongued old Lady Fanshawe, everybody said what a
fool he had made of himself. What did he, a man who had already
developed a capacity for expenditure much in excess of his income, want
with a wife who brought little or no grist to the mill? The world was
wrong--as the world very frequently is on such points. It was about
the first sensible thing that the "Rip," in the course of his
good-humoured, blundering, plunging c