had much impressed the matron with her
younger friend. Before they parted she said, with the sort of affability
which is meant to signify the beginning of permanent friendship: 'A
friend of my husband's, Lord Mountclere, has been anxious for some time
to meet you. He is a great admirer of the poems, and more still of the
story-telling invention, and your power in it. He has been present many
times at the Mayfair Hall to hear you. When will you dine with us to
meet him? I know you will like him. Will Thursday be convenient?'

Ethelberta stood for a moment reflecting, and reflecting hoped that Mrs.
Doncastle had not noticed her momentary perplexity. Crises were becoming
as common with her as blackberries; and she had foreseen this one a long
time. It was not that she was to meet Lord Mountclere, for he was only a
name and a distant profile to her: it was that her father would
necessarily be present at the meeting, in the most anomalous position
that human nature could endure.

However, having often proved in her disjointed experience that the
shortest way out of a difficulty lies straight through it, Ethelberta
decided to dine at the Doncastles', and, as she murmured that she should
have great pleasure in meeting any friend of theirs, set about contriving
how the encounter with her dearest relative might be made safe and
unsuspected. She bade them adieu blithely; but the thoughts engendered
by the invitation stood before her as sorrowful and rayless ghosts which
could not be laid. Often at such conjunctures as these, when the
futility of her great undertaking was more than usually manifest, did
Ethelberta long like a tired child for the conclusion of the whole
matter; when her work should be over, and the evening come; when she
might draw her boat upon the shore, and in some thymy nook await eternal
night with a placid mind.

28. ETHELBERTA'S--MR. CHICKEREL'S ROOM

The question of Neigh or no Neigh had reached a pitch of insistence which
no longer permitted of dallying, even by a popular beauty. His character
was becoming defined to Ethelberta as something very differently composed
from that of her first imagining. She had set him down to be a man whose
external in excitability owed nothing to self-repression, but stood as
the natural surface of the mass within. Neigh's urban torpor, she said,
might have been in the first instance produced by art, but, were it thus,
it had gone so far as to permea