e they called?"

"One of them is married. She is the Countess of Pimlico."

"And the other?"

"The other is unmarried; she is plain Lady Julia."

Bessie Alden looked at him a moment. "Is she very plain?"

Beaumont began to laugh again. "You would not find her so handsome
as her brother," he said; and it was after this that he attempted
to dissuade the heir of the Duke of Bayswater from accepting Mrs.
Westgate's invitation. "Depend upon it," he said, "that girl means to
try for you."

"It seems to me you are doing your best to make a fool of me," the
modest young nobleman answered.

"She has been asking me," said Beaumont, "all about your people and your
possessions."

"I am sure it is very good of her!" Lord Lambeth rejoined.

"Well, then," observed his companion, "if you go, you go with your eyes
open."

"Damn my eyes!" exclaimed Lord Lambeth. "If one is to be a dozen times
a day at the house, it is a great deal more convenient to sleep there. I
am sick of traveling up and down this beastly avenue."

Since he had determined to go, Percy Beaumont would, of course, have
been very sorry to allow him to go alone; he was a man of conscience,
and he remembered his promise to the duchess. It was obviously the
memory of this promise that made him say to his companion a couple of
days later that he rather wondered he should be so fond of that girl.

"In the first place, how do you know how fond I am of her?" asked Lord
Lambeth. "And, in the second place, why shouldn't I be fond of her?"

"I shouldn't think she would be in your line."

"What do you call my 'line'? You don't set her down as 'fast'?"

"Exactly so. Mrs. Westgate tells me that there is no such thing as the
'fast girl' in America; that it's an English invention, and that the
term has no meaning here."

"All the better. It's an animal I detest."

"You prefer a bluestocking."

"Is that what you call Miss Alden?"

"Her sister tells me," said Percy Beaumont, "that she is tremendously
literary."

"I don't know anything about that. She is certainly very clever."

"Well," said Beaumont, "I should have supposed you would have found that
sort of thing awfully slow."

"In point of fact," Lord Lambeth rejoined, "I find it uncommonly
lively."

After this, Percy Beaumont held his tongue; but on the 10th of August
he wrote to the Duchess of Bayswater. He was, as I have said, a man of
conscience, and he had a strong, incorruptible sense of the propriet