y.

We think of our brief campaign in town with great pleasure, and a
strong sense of obligation to you who did so much for the pleasure
of it. Most truly yours,

M. WARRENDER.

She sent this epistle off with great satisfaction, yet a little sense
of guilt, that same evening, taking particular care to give it to the
parlour maid with her own hand, lest Chatty should see the address. It
was already September, and the time of the partridges had begun.

CHAPTER XXXIX.

When the ladies left London, Dick Cavendish had felt himself something
like a wreck upon the shore. The season was very near its end, and
invitations no longer came in dozens. To be sure there were a great many
other wrecks whose society made life tolerable; but he felt himself out
of heart, out of temper, seized by that sudden disgust with life in
general which is often the result of the departure of one person who has
given it a special interest. It was a strong effect to be produced by
Chatty's unpretending personality, but it affected him more than if she
had been in herself a more striking personage. For it was not so much
that her presence made a blank in any of the gay scenes that still
remained, but that she suggested another kind of scene altogether. He
felt that to say it was a bore to go out was no longer that easy fiction
which it usually is. It _was_ a bore to go out into those aimless
assemblies where not to go was a social mistake, yet to go was weariness
of the flesh and spirit. In the midst of them his thoughts would turn
to the little group in Half Moon Street which had made the commonplace
drawing-room of the lodging-house into a home. Chatty over her muslin
work--he laughed to himself when he thought of it. It was not lovely;
there was no poetry about it; the little scissors and sharp pointed
blade that made the little holes; the patient labour that sewed them
round. So far as he was aware there was not much use in the work, and no
prettiness at all; a lover might linger over an embroidery frame, and
rave of seeing the flowers grow under her hand; but the little checkered
pattern of holes--there was nothing at all delightful in that. Yet he
thought of it, which was amazing, and laughed at himself, then thought
of it again. He was not what could be called of the domestic order of
man. He had "knocked about," he had seen all sorts of things and people,
and to think that his heart should be caught by Chatty a