nted expression, "I
am going to give you a mission after your own heart. You are to take
Miss Beresford over there, to where Mrs. Bohun is dealing death to all
those boys.--This is Lord Rossmoyne, Miss Beresford: he will see you
safely over your rubicon."

"Oh, thank you!" says Monica, gratefully smiling at her.

"Tut, child! thank me when I have done something for you. It is Fred's
turn to thank me now," says Madam O'Connor, with a merry twinkle in her
gray eyes.

She is a large woman close on sixty, with an eagle eye and a hawk's
nose. As Monica leaves her she continues her gossip with the half dozen
young men round her, who are all laughing at some joke. Presently she
herself is laughing louder than any of them (being partial to boys and
their "fun," as she calls it). Bestowing now a smart blow with her fan
upon the youngest and probably therefore most flippant of her
attendants, she stalks away from them across the lawn, to where two
ladies are sitting together.

One is elderly, but most ridiculously dressed in juvenile attire, that
might have well suited the daughter sitting beside her. This latter is a
tall girl, and large in every way, with curious eyes and a rather harsh
voice; she is laughing now at some remark made by a man lounging at the
back of her chair, and the laugh is both affected and discordant.

"Have you seen that girl of Kitty Beresford's, Edith?" asks Madam
O'Connor of the elder lady.

"That little washed-out-looking girl who came with those two old Miss
Blakes?" asks the youthful old woman, with a profoundly juvenile lisp.

"Faith, I don't know about her being washed out," says Madam O'Connor,
bluntly. "I think she is the prettiest creature I've seen this many a
day."

"You are so impulsive, my dear Theresa!" says her friend, with a simper:
"all your geese are swans."

"And other people's swans my geese, I suppose," says Madam, with a
glance at the tall girl, which somehow brings the conversation to a full
stop.

Meantime, Monica is crossing the soft turf, with the moody man called
Rossmoyne beside her. She can see her goal in the distance, and finds
comfort in the thought that soon she must be there, as she cannot bring
herself to be agreeable to her new acquaintance; and certainly he is
feeling no desire just at present to be agreeable to her or to anybody.

As Monica comes nearer to her friend, she gazes anxiously at her, as
though to see if time has worked a change in her.

Sh