eak, and compared
with her transcendent beauty, Miss Blossom, as Logan afterwards remarked,
seemed a

'Wee modest crimson-tippit beastie,'

he intending to quote the poet Burns.

After salutations, Merton remarked to Miss Blossom that her well-known
discretion might prompt her to take a seat near the window while he
discussed private business with Miss Willoughby. The good-humoured girl
retired to contemplate life from the casement, while Merton rapidly laid
the nature of Lord Embleton's affairs before the other lady.

'You go down to Rookchester as a kinswoman and a guest, you understand,
and to do the business of the manuscripts.'

'Oh, I shall rather like that than otherwise,' said Miss Willoughby,
smiling.

'Then, as to the regular business of the Society, there is a Prince who
seems to be thought unworthy of the daughter of the house; and the son of
the house needs disentangling from an American heiress of great charm and
wealth.'

'The tasks might satisfy any ambition,' said Miss Willoughby. 'Is the
idea that the Prince and the Viscount should _both_ neglect their former
flames?'

'And burn incense at the altar of Venus Verticordia,' said Merton, with a
bow.

'It is a large order,' replied Miss Willoughby, in the simple phrase of a
commercial age: but as Merton looked at her, and remembered the
vindictive feeling with which she now regarded his sex, he thought that
she, if anyone, was capable of executing the commission. He was not, of
course, as yet aware of the moral resolution lately arrived at by the
young potentate of Scalastro.

'The manuscripts are the first thing, of course,' he said, and, as he
spoke, Logan and Lord Embleton re-entered the room.

Merton presented the Earl to the ladies, and Miss Blossom soon retired to
her own apartment, and wrestled with the correspondence of the Society
and with her typewriting-machine.

The Earl proved not to be nearly so shy where ladies were concerned. He
had not expected to find in his remote and long-lost cousin, Miss
Willoughby, a magnificent being like Persephone on a coin of Syracuse,
but it was plain that he was prepossessed in her favour, and there was a
touch of the affectionate in his courtesy. After congratulating himself
on recovering a kinswoman of a long-separated branch of his family, and
after a good deal of genealogical disquisition, he explained the nature
of the lady's historical tasks, and engaged her to visit him in the
co