well-assumed importance. The flunkeys relaxed their formal
attitudes and hastened to assist both mother and daughter into its
somewhat stuffy recess. Another moment and they were driven off, Lucy
looking out of the window at the numerous lights which twinkled from
every story of the stately building they had just left, till the last
bright point of luminance had vanished. Then the strain on her mind gave
way--and to Mrs. Sorrel's alarm and amazement, she suddenly burst into a
stormy passion of tears.

"It's all over!" she sobbed angrily, "all over! I've lost him! I've lost
everything!"

Mrs. Sorrel gave a kind of weasel cry and clasped her fat hands
convulsively.

"Oh, you little fool!" she burst out, "what have you done?"

Thus violently adjured, Lucy, with angry gasps of spite and
disappointment, related in full the maddening, the eccentric, the
altogether incomprehensible and inexcusable conduct of the famous
millionaire, "old Gold-dust," towards her beautiful, outraged, and
injured self. Her mother sat listening in a kind of frozen horror which
might possibly have become rigid, had it not been for the occasional
bumping of the hired brougham over ruts and loose stones, which bumping
shook her superfluous flesh into agitated bosom-waves.

"I ought to have guessed it! I ought to have followed my own instinct!"
she said, in sepulchral tones. "It came to me like a flash, when I was
talking to him this evening! I said to myself, 'he is in a moral mood.'
And he was. Nothing is so hopeless, so dreadful! If I had only thought
he would carry on that mood with you, I would have warned you! You could
have held off a little--it would perhaps have been the wiser course."

"I should think it would indeed!" cried Lucy, dabbing her eyes with her
scented handkerchief; "He would have left me every penny he has in the
world if I had refused him! He told me so as coolly as possible!"

Mrs. Sorrel sank back with a groan.

"Oh dear, oh dear!" she wailed feebly. "Can nothing be done?"

"Nothing!" And Lucy, now worked up to hysterical pitch, felt as if she
could break the windows, beat her mother, or do anything else equally
reckless and irresponsible. "I shall be left to myself now,--he will
never ask me to his house again, never give me any parties or drives or
opera-boxes or jewels,--he will never come to see me, and I shall have
no pleasure at all! I shall sink into a dowdy, frowsy, shabby-genteel
old maid for the rest of my