ay still for a while, and then
repeated the process backwards. After a time the bed-clothes began
to prick him, and the heat to become a positive torture. He leapt
out, and tore at the bell-rope, until it came away in his hand--just
as his wife reappeared.

"Will you kindly inform me what the devil's wrong with this bed?
Who made it?"

"Selina, dear."

"Then will you kindly give Selina a month's notice on the spot?
Do you hear? On the spot--What's that?"

The Admiral rushed to the window and pulled up the blind. He was
just in time to see a close carriage and pair dash past and pull up
at "The Bower."

A moment afterwards, Miss Limpenny, from the first-storey window of
No. 1, saw the carriage door open, and a tall gentleman emerge.
The tall gentleman was followed by a lady, whom even at that distance
Miss Limpenny could see to possess a remarkably graceful figure.
A small youth in livery sprang down from beside the coachman and
helped to lower the boxes, whilst the new arrivals passed into the
house where the charwoman, Mrs. Snell, stood smearing her face with
her apron, and ducking in frenzied welcome.

The Honourable Frederic Augustus Hythe Goodwyn-Sandys and his wife,
instead of arriving by train, had posted from Five-Lanes Junction.

There was no public demonstration. They might as well have come in
the dead of night. Miss Limpenny was almost the sole witness of
their arrival, and Miss Limpenny's observations were cut short by a
terrible occurrence.

She had taken stock of the Honourable Frederic, and pronounced him
"aristocratic-looking"; of the Honourable Mrs. Frederic's
travelling-dress, and decided it to be _Cumeelfo_; she had counted
the boxes twice, and made them seven each time; she was about to
count the buttons on the liveried youth, when--

To this day she sinks her voice as she narrates it. She saw--the
unseemliness, the monstrous indelicacy of it!--she saw--the nightcap
and shoulders of Admiral Buzza craning out of the next-door window!

What happened next? Whether she actually fainted, or merely kept her
eyes shut, she cannot clearly remember. But for weeks afterwards, as
she declares, the sight of a man caused her to "turn all colours."

It was significant, this nightcap of Admiral Buzza--as the ram's horn
to Jericho, the Mother Carey's chicken to the doomed ship.
It announced, even as it struck, the first blow at the old morality
of Troy.

CHAPTER IV.

OF CERTAIN LE