smiled blandly.

"Now, Flopsie!" he said in a tone of gentle severity. "Excited again--as
usual! It's bad for your 'elth--very bad! _Hif_ the chops is dried, your
course is plain--cook some more! Not that I am enny ways particular--but
chippy meat is bad for a delicate digestion. And you would not make me
hill, my Flopsie, would you?"

Whereupon he seated himself, and looked condescendingly round the table.
He was too great a personage to be familiar with such inferior creatures
as housemaids, scullery-girls, and menials of that class,--he was only
on intimate terms with the cook, Mrs. Flopper, or, as he called her,
"Flopsie,"--the coachman, and Lady Winsleigh's own maid, Louise Renaud,
a prim, sallow-faced Frenchwoman, who, by reason of her nationality, was
called by all the inhabitants of the kitchen, "mamzelle," as being a
name both short, appropriate, and convenient.

On careful examination, the lamb-chops turned out
satisfactorily--"chippiness" was an epithet that could not justly be
applied to them,--and Mr. Briggs began to eat them leisurely, flavoring
them with a glass or two of fine port out of a decanter which he had
taken the precaution to bring down from the dining-room sideboard.

"I _ham_, late," he then graciously explained--"not that I was detained
in enny way by the people upstairs. The gay Clara went out early, but I
was absorbed in the evenin' papers--Winsleigh forgot to ask me for them.
But he'll see them at his club. He's gone there now on foot-poor
fellah!"

"I suppose _she's_ with the same party?" grinned the fat Flopsie, as she
held a large piece of bacon dipped in vinegar on her fork, preparatory
to swallowing it with a gulp.

Briggs nodded gravely, "The same! Not a fine man at all, you know--no
leg to speak of, and therefore no form. Legs--_good_ legs--are beauty.
Now, Winsleigh's not bad in that particular,--and I dare say Clara can
hold her own,--but I wouldn't bet on little Francis."

Flopsie shrieked with laughter till she had a "stitch in her side," and
was compelled to restrain her mirth.

"Lor', Mr. Briggs!" she gasped, wiping the moisture from her eyes, "you
are a regular one, aren't you! Mussy on us, you ought to put all wot you
say in the papers--you'd make your fortin!"

"Maybe, maybe, Flopsie," returned Briggs with due dignity. "I will not
deny that there may be wot is called 'sparkle' in my natur. And
'sparkle' is wot is rekwired in polite literatoor. Look at 'Hedmund' a