s felt him approach her chair. She
did not even turn to look at him, so he took her hand, and placed two
coins in it, saying in his most gracious way that the sovereign was for
her father, and the guinea--the spade-guinea--for herself. She muttered
something--she knew not what--she could but just restrain herself from
throwing the money on the floor.

It was known in a moment that Amaryllis had the guinea. Conceive the
horror, the hatred, the dread of the crowd of sycophants! That the
Heiress Apparent should be the favourite!

Yet more. Half-an-hour later, just after they had all got upstairs into
the great drawing-room, and some were officiously and reverently
admiring the peacock-feather in the screen, and some looking out of the
bow window at the fair, there came a message for Amaryllis to put on her
hat and go for a walk with her grandfather.

There was not one among all the crowd in the drawing-room who had ever
been invited to accompany Iden Pacha.

Three days ago at home, if anyone had told Amaryllis that she would be
singled out in this way, first to receive the Iden medal--the
spade-guinea stamp of approval--and then, above all things, to be
honoured by walking out with this "almighty" grandfather, how delighted
she would have been at the thought of the triumph!

But now it was just the reverse. Triumph over these people--pah! a
triumph over rats and flies or some such creatures. She actually felt
lowered in her own esteem by being noticed at all among them. Honoured
by this old horror--she revolted at it. _He_ honour her with his
approval--she hated him.

The other day a travelling piano was wheeled through Coombe and set up
a tune in that lonesome spot. Though it was but a mechanical piece of
music, with the cogs as it were of the mechanism well marked by the
thump, thump, it seemed to cheer the place--till she went out to the
gate to look at the Italian woman who danced about while the grinding
was done, and saw that she had a sound pair of boots on. That very
morning her mother in crossing the road had set the Flamma rheumatism
shooting in her bones, for the dampness of the mud came through the
crack in her boot.

This miserable old Iden Pacha thought to honour her while he let her
mother walk about with her stocking on the wet ground!

The Flamma blood was up in her veins--what did she care for guineas!

As she was putting her hat on in the bedroom before the glass she looked
round to see that n