this year, and we miss you: we
expected you to give us two or three things this season; we did now,
really. I said to Tufthunt, only yesterday, Why has not Lady Anne
Newcome given anything? You know Tufthunt? They say he's a clever
fellow, and that--but he's a low little beast, and I hate him."

Lady Anne said, "Sir Brian's bad state of health prevented her from
going out this season, or receiving at home."

"It don't prevent your mother from going out, though," continued my
lord. "Upon my honour, I think unless she got two or three things every
night, I think she'd die. Lady Kew's like one of those horses, you know,
that unless they go they drop."

"Thank you for my mother," said Lady Anne.

"She is, upon my honour. Last night I know she was at ever so many
places. She dined at the Bloxams', for I was there. Then she said
she was going to sit with old Mrs. Crackthorpe, who has broke her
collar-bone (that Crackthorpe in the Life Guards, her grandson, is a
brute, and I hope she won't leave him a shillin'); and then she came on
to Lady Hawkstone's, where I heard her say she had been at the--at the
Flowerdales', too. People begin to go to those Flowerdales'. Hanged--if
I know where they won't go next. Cotton-spinner, wasn't he?"

"So were we, my lord," says Miss Newcome.

"Oh, yes, I forgot! But you're of an old family--very old family."

"We can't help it," said Miss Ethel, archly. Indeed, she thought she
was.

"Do you believe in the barber-surgeon?" asked Clive. And my lord looked
at him with a noble curiosity, as much as to say, "Who the deuce was the
barber-surgeon? and who the devil are you?"

"Why should we disown our family?" Miss Ethel said, simply. "In those
early days I suppose people did--did all sorts of things, and it was
not considered at all out of the way to be surgeon to William the
Conqueror."

"Edward the Confessor," interposed Clive. "And it must be true, because
I have seen a picture of the barber-surgeon, a friend of mine, M'Collop,
did the picture, and I dare say it is for sale still"

Lady Anne said "she should be delighted to see it." Lord Farintosh
remembered that the M'Collop had the moor next to his in Argyleshire,
but did not choose to commit himself with the stranger, and preferred
looking at his own handsome face and admiring it in the glass until the
last speaker had concluded his remarks.

As Clive did not offer any further conversation, but went back to a
table, where he beg