, you may look very fetching, if you are nineteen, and the
right sex for the adjective. Miss Sally did, being both, and for our
own part we think it was inconsiderate and thoughtless of cook. Sally
was sprung upon that young man like a torpedo on a ship with no guards
out, saying with fascinating geniality through a smile (as one
interests oneself in a civility that means nothing) that Mr. Fenwick
had just gone out, and she didn't know when he would be back. But why
not ask Mrs. Prince at the school, opposite St. Satisfax, where we
went to church; she was French, and would be sure to know what it
meant. _She_ wouldn't mind! "Say I sent you." And the youth, whom the
torpedo had struck amidships, was just departing, conscious of
reluctance, when Mr. Fenwick appeared, having come back for his
umbrella.

Sally played quite fair. She didn't hang about as she might have done,
to rub her pearly teeth and merry eyebrows into her victim. She went
back and gardened honourably, while Mr. Fenwick solved the riddle and
supplied the letter. But for all that, the young man appeared next
Sunday at St. Satisfax's, with an extremely new prayer-book that
looked as if his religious convictions were recent, and never took
his eyes off Sally all through the service--that is, if he did as she
supposed, and peeped all the while that his head ought to have been,
as she metaphorically expressed it, "under the clothes."

Now, this was naturally a little unaccountable to Sally, after such
a very short interview; and on the part, too, of a young gentleman who
passed all the working hours of the day among working houris, as it
were soaked and saturated in their fascinations, and not at liberty
to squeeze their hands or ask them for one little lock of hair all
through shop-time. Sally did not realise the force of sameness, nor
the amount of contempt familiarity will breed. Perhaps the houris got
tired and snappish, poor things! and used up their artificial smiles
on the customers. Perhaps it had leaked out that the trying-on hands
contributed only length, personally, to the loveliness of the
trying-on figures. All sorts of things might have happened to
influence this young man towards St. Satisfax; and how did Sally know
how often he had seen the other young lady communicants she had
speculated about? Her mind had certainly thrown in the large Miss
Baker with something of derision. But that Sylvia Peplow was just the
sort of girl men run after, lik