Ethel.

Many a splendid assembly, and many a brilliant next year, will the
ardent and hopeful young creature enjoy; but in the midst of her
splendour and triumphs, buzzing flatterers, conquered rivals, prostrate
admirers, no doubt she will think sometimes of that quiet season before
the world began for her, and that dear old friend, on whose arm she
leaned while she was yet a young girl.

The Colonel comes to Park Street early in the forenoon, when the
mistress of the house, surrounded by her little ones, is administering
dinner to them. He behaves with splendid courtesy to Miss Quigley, the
governess, and makes a point of taking wine with her, and of making
a most profound bow during that ceremony. Miss Quigley cannot help
thinking Colonel Newcome's bow very fine. She has an idea that his
late Majesty must have bowed in that way: she flutteringly imparts this
opinion to Lady Anne's maid; who tells her mistress, who tells Miss
Ethel, who watches the Colonel the next time he takes wine with Miss
Quigley, and they laugh, and then Ethel tells him; so that the gentleman
and the governess have to blush ever after when they drink wine
together. When she is walking with her little charges in the Park, or
in that before-mentioned paradise nigh to Apsley House, faint signals of
welcome appear on her wan cheeks. She knows the dear Colonel amongst a
thousand horsemen. If Ethel makes for her uncle purses, guard-chains,
antimacassars, and the like beautiful and useful articles, I believe it
is in reality Miss Quigley who does four-fifths of the work, as she
sits alone in the schoolroom, high, high up in that lone house, when the
little ones are long since asleep, before her dismal little tea-tray,
and her little desk containing her mother's letters and her mementos of
home.

There are, of course, numberless fine parties in Park Lane, where
the Colonel knows he would be very welcome. But if there be grand
assemblies, he does not care to come. "I like to go to the club best,"
he says to Lady Anne. "We talk there as you do here about persons, and
about Jack marrying, and Tom dying, and so forth. But we have known Jack
and Tom all our lives, and so are interested in talking about them. Just
as you are in speaking of your own friends and habitual society. They
are people whose names I have sometimes read in the newspaper, but whom
I never thought of meeting until I came to your house. What has an old
fellow like me to say to your youn