rick and mortar to wit and poetry, or not see a beauty upon it beyond
architecture in the splendour of the recollection.'

Chapter X. Apropos of advertisements.

Francesca wishes to get some old hall-marked silver for her home
tea-tray, and she is absorbed at present in answering advertisements of
people who have second-hand pieces for sale, and who offer to bring them
on approval. The other day, when Willie Beresford and I came in from
Westminster Abbey (where we had been choosing the best locations for
our memorial tablets), we thought Francesca must be giving a 'small and
early'; but it transpired that all the silver-sellers had called at the
same hour, and it took the united strength of Dawson and Mr. Beresford,
together with my diplomacy, to rescue the poor child from their
clutches. She came out alive, but her safety was purchased at the cost
of a George IV. cream-jug, an Elizabethan sugar-bowl, and a Boadicea
tea-caddy, which were, I doubt not, manufactured in Wardour Street
towards the close of the nineteenth century.

Salemina came in just then, cold and tired. (Tower and National Gallery
the same day. It's so much more work to go to the Tower nowadays than
it used to be!) We had intended to take a sail to Richmond on a penny
steamboat, but it was drizzling, so we had a cosy fire instead, slipped
into our tea-gowns, and ordered tea and thin bread-and-butter, a basket
of strawberries with their frills on, and a jug of Devonshire cream.
Willie Beresford asked if he might stay; otherwise, he said, he should
have to sit at a cold marble table on the corner of Bond Street and
Piccadilly, and take his tea in bachelor solitude.

"Yes," I said severely, "we will allow you to stay; though, as you are
coming to dinner, I should think you would have to go away some time,
if only in order that you might get ready to come back. You've been here
since breakfast-time."

"I know," he answered calmly, "and my only error in judgment was that I
didn't take an earlier breakfast, in order to begin my day here sooner.
One has to snatch a moment when he can, nowadays; for these rooms are
so infested with British swells that a base-born American stands very
little chance!"

Now I should like to know if Willie Beresford is in love with Francesca.
What shall I do--that is what shall we do--if he is, when she is in love
with somebody else? To be sure, she may want one lover for foreign and
another for domestic service. He i