but not in the way insinuated
by Mrs. Egleton. Half fashionable London flocked to Hampstead in the
summer, ostensibly to drink the water of the medicinal spring, but
really to gamble, to dance and to flirt outrageously. There was plenty
of entertainment too, of various sorts.

Then she thought of Hannah's cousin, Betty Higgins at Hampstead. Lavinia
had saved a little money while with Rich and Huddy and she could afford
a small rent for lodgings while she was seeking how to maintain herself.
Concerts were given at the Great Room, Hampstead Wells. She might appear
there too. She would love it. She had seldom had an opportunity of
singing in any of the parts she had played, and singing was what her
soul delighted in.

She made her way to Hampstead. The heath was wild enough in those
days--clumps of woodland, straggling bushes, wide expanses of turf, vast
pits made by the gravel and sand diggers, the slopes scored by water
courses with here and there a foot path--all was picturesque. The ponds
were very much as they are now, save that their boundaries were not
restrained and after heavy rains the water spread at its own free will.

The village itself on the slopes overlooking the heath was cramped, the
houses squeezed together in narrow passages with openings here and there
where glorious views of the Highgate Woods and the country beyond
delighted the eye.

Lavinia inquired for Betty Higgins in the village, but without success.
Indeed, the houses were not such as washerwomen could afford to live in.
Then she went into the quaint tavern known as the Upper Flask and here
she was told that a Mrs. Higgins who did laundry work was to be found in
a cottage not far from Jack Straw's Castle on the Spaniards' road and
thither Lavinia tramped, footsore and tired, for she had walked all the
way from London.

Betty, a stout, sturdy woman was at her clothes lines stretched from
posts on a patch of drying ground in front of her cottage. She opened
wide her round blue eyes as Lavinia approached her.

"Are you Betty Higgins?" asked Lavinia.

"Aye, that's me sure enough; an' who may you be, young woman?"

"I'm Lavinia Fenton, a friend of your Cousin Hannah, who works for my
mother at the coffee house in the Old Bailey."

"So you're the young miss as she told me of! Why, that be months an'
months agone. An' you never comed. It put me about, it did."

"I'm very sorry. I never thought of that. But so many things I didn't
expect pr