ers a great deal."

"Why, you talk as if you were fond of her!"

"I am."

The doctor's clouded intelligence was beginning to clear; he made a
smart reply: "Fond of her, and deceiving her--aha!"

"Yes," she said quietly, "that's just what it is. It has grown on me,
little by little; I can't help liking Miss Henley."

"Well," Mr. Vimpany remarked, "you _are_ a fool!" He looked at her
cunningly. "Suppose I do make myself useful, what am I to gain by it?"

"Let us get back," she suggested, "to the gentleman who invited you to
dinner, and made you tipsy for his own purposes."

"I'll break every bone in his skin!"

"Don't talk nonsense! Leave Mr. Mountjoy to me."

"Do _you_ take his part? I can tell you this. If I drank too much of
that poisonous French stuff, Mountjoy set me the example. He was
tipsy--as you call it--shamefully tipsy, I give you my word of honour.
What's the matter now?"

His wife (so impenetrably cool, thus far) had suddenly become excited.
There was not the smallest fragment of truth in what he had just said
of Hugh, and Mrs. Vimpany was not for a moment deceived by it. But the
lie had, accidentally, one merit--it suggested to her the idea which
she had vainly tried to find over her cup of tea. "Suppose I show you
how you may be revenged on Mr. Mountjoy," she said.

"Well?"

"Will you remember what I asked you to do for me, if Lord Harry takes
us by surprise?"

He produced his pocket-diary, and told her to make a memorandum of it.
She wrote as briefly as if she had been writing a telegram: "Keep Lord
Harry from seeing Miss Henley, till I have seen her first."

"Now," she said, taking a chair by the bedside, "you shall know what a
clever wife you have got. Listen to me."

CHAPTER VIII

HER FATHER'S MESSAGE

LOOKING out of the drawing-room window, for the tenth time at least,
Mountjoy at last saw Iris in the street, returning to the house.

She brought the maid with her into the drawing-room, in the gayest of
good spirits, and presented Rhoda to Mountjoy.

"What a blessing a good long walk is, if we only knew it!" she
exclaimed. "Look at my little maid's colour! Who would suppose that she
came here with heavy eyes and pale cheeks? Except that she loses her
way in the town, whenever she goes out alone, we have every reason to
congratulate ourselves on our residence at Honeybuzzard. The doctor is
Rhoda's good genius, and the doctor's wife is her fairy godmother."

Mountjoy's court