three pipes,
told two funny stories, sang one comic song, and then went home, having
previously exacted from the three bachelors a promise to call at his
rooms and see at least one half of the panorama completed, on the
following day week.

Since Miss Wilkeson had been an inmate of that house, she had seen
Wesley Tiffles perhaps a dozen times, in the entry or on the doorsteps,
and had been impressed with his gentlemanlike air, his quick black eyes,
and his deferential manner toward her. Everybody is supposed to have a
realized ideal somewhere, if he or she could only find it. Such was
Wesley Tiffles to Philomela Wilkeson. Let it be confessed at once. The
lost scissors were all the time quietly resting at the bottom of Miss
Wilkeson's workbag, and she knew it. The prevalent frailty of human
nature must be her excuse.

She had-obtained not only an introduction to Wesley Tiffles, but a pair
of scissors which must be returned to him, and were therefore a bond of
friendship. But Miss Wilkeson forgot the fatality which the proverb
attaches to gifts or loans of that particular article of cutlery.

BOOK FIFTH.

MANOEUVRES.

CHAPTER I.

STOLEN--MOKE THAN A PURSE.

One morning, as Marcus Wilkeson was idly turning the pages of a
blue-and-gold favorite, the doorbell rang. In accordance with some
mysterious law of acoustics, the sound was full three minutes descending
the kitchen staircase, entering the keyhole of the kitchen door, and
striking on the tympanum of Mash, the cook, who was sitting by the fire,
reading the twenty-fifth chapter of "The Buttery and the Boudoir: A Tale
of Real Life." When Mash became fully conscious (which was not till the
end of the chapter) that the bell had rung, she expelled a sigh from her
fat chest, and wiped the tears from her eyes with the end of her clean
apron, and then went to the door with a noble resignation to her lot.
There she found a stout elderly woman, bearing a note for "Marcus
Wilkeson, Esq."

"Lor'! how slow you are!" said the stout woman, handing the letter to
her.

Mash, who had read, in the twenty-third chapter, of the overwhelming way
in which the heroine cook had answered an insult by dignified silence,
said not a word in reply, but took the note, and slammed the door in the
stout woman's face.

The exclamation "Bah!" and certain indistinct mutterings which were
audible through the panels, convinced Mash that, by her self-denial, she
had won a moral victory