ce entailed by all these affairs,
she found three secretaries none too many. On M. Etienne Rambert's
recommendation, Therese Auvernois was now one of these, and the young
girl was perfectly happy in her new surroundings; time was helping her
to forget the tragedy which had taken her grandmother from her at
Beaulieu, and she enjoyed the company of the well-born, well-bred
English gentlewomen.

Lady Beltham was reclining on a sofa in the great hall of her house at
Neuilly. It was a spacious room, furnished half as a lounge and half as
an office, and Lady Beltham liked to receive people there. A large
glass-enclosed balcony commanded a view over the garden and the
boulevard Richard Wallace beyond, with the Bois de Boulogne beyond that
again. A few minutes before, a footman had brought in a table and set
out tea-things, and Lady Beltham was reading while Therese and the two
young English girls were chattering among themselves.

The telephone bell rang and Therese answered it.

"Hullo? Yes ... yes: you want to know if you may call this evening? The
Reverend--oh, yes: you have just come from Scotland? Hold on a minute."
She turned to Lady Beltham. "It is Mr. William Hope, and he wants to
know if you will see him to-night. He has just come from your place in
Scotland."

"The dear man!" exclaimed Lady Beltham; "of course he may come," and as
Therese turned lightly to convey her permission to the clergyman waiting
at the other end of the line, she caught a smile on the face of one of
the other girls. "What is the joke, Lisbeth?" she enquired.

The girl laughed brightly.

"I think the worthy parson must have smelt the tea and toast, and wants
to make up for the wretched dinner he got in the train."

"You are incorrigible," Lady Beltham replied. "Mr. Hope is above such
material matters."

"Indeed he isn't, Lady Beltham," the girl persisted. "Why, only the
other day he told Therese that all food deserved respect and esteem
directly a blessing had been asked upon it, and that a badly cooked
steak was a kind of sacrilege."

"A badly cooked pheasant," Therese corrected her.

"You are both wicked little slanderers," Lady Beltham protested gently,
"and don't know the blessing a good appetite is. You do, Susannah, don't
you?"

Susannah, a pretty Irish girl, looked up from a letter she was reading,
and blushed.

"Oh, Lady Beltham, I've been ever so much less hungry since Harry's ship
sailed."

"I don't quite see the conn