room kept up a loud and ceaseless buzzing and
talking, but the Lady Steyne did not hear those rumours. She was a
child again--and had wandered back through a forty years' wilderness to
her convent garden. The chapel organ had pealed the same tones, the
organist, the sister whom she loved best of the community, had taught
them to her in those early happy days. She was a girl once more, and
the brief period of her happiness bloomed out again for an hour--she
started when the jarring doors were flung open, and with a loud laugh
from Lord Steyne, the men of the party entered full of gaiety.

He saw at a glance what had happened in his absence, and was grateful
to his wife for once. He went and spoke to her, and called her by her
Christian name, so as again to bring blushes to her pale face--"My wife
says you have been singing like an angel," he said to Becky. Now there
are angels of two kinds, and both sorts, it is said, are charming in
their way.

Whatever the previous portion of the evening had been, the rest of that
night was a great triumph for Becky. She sang her very best, and it
was so good that every one of the men came and crowded round the piano.
The women, her enemies, were left quite alone. And Mr. Paul Jefferson
Jones thought he had made a conquest of Lady Gaunt by going up to her
Ladyship and praising her delightful friend's first-rate singing.

CHAPTER L

Contains a Vulgar Incident

The Muse, whoever she be, who presides over this Comic History must now
descend from the genteel heights in which she has been soaring and have
the goodness to drop down upon the lowly roof of John Sedley at
Brompton, and describe what events are taking place there. Here, too,
in this humble tenement, live care, and distrust, and dismay. Mrs.
Clapp in the kitchen is grumbling in secret to her husband about the
rent, and urging the good fellow to rebel against his old friend and
patron and his present lodger. Mrs. Sedley has ceased to visit her
landlady in the lower regions now, and indeed is in a position to
patronize Mrs. Clapp no longer. How can one be condescending to a lady
to whom one owes a matter of forty pounds, and who is perpetually
throwing out hints for the money? The Irish maidservant has not altered
in the least in her kind and respectful behaviour; but Mrs. Sedley
fancies that she is growing insolent and ungrateful, and, as the guilty
thief who fears each bush an officer, sees threatening innuendoe