n pondered and then, a little to Vanderbank's surprise, at any
rate to his deeper amusement, candidly asked: "Only Fernanda? No other
lady?"

"Oh yes, several other ladies."

Mr. Longdon appeared to hear this with pleasure. "You're quite right. We
don't make enough of Sunday at Beccles."

"Oh we make plenty of it in London!" Vanderbank said. "And I think it's
rather in my interest I should mention that Mrs. Brookenham calls ME--"

His visitor covered him now with an attention that just operated as a
check. "By your Christian name?"

Before Vanderbank could in any degree attenuate "What IS your Christian
name?" Mr. Longdon asked.

Vanderbank felt of a sudden almost guilty--as if his answer could only
impute extravagance to the lady. "My Christian name"--he blushed it
out--"is Gustavus."

His friend took a droll conscious leap. "And she calls you Gussy?"

"No, not even Gussy. But I scarcely think I ought to tell you,"
he pursued, "if she herself gave you no glimpse of the fact. Any
implication that she consciously avoided it might make you see deeper
depths."

He spoke with pointed levity, but his companion showed him after an
instant a face just covered--and a little painfully--with the vision of
the possibility brushed away by the joke. "Oh I'm not so bad as that!"
Mr. Longdon modestly ejaculated.

"Well, she doesn't do it always," Vanderbank laughed, "and it's nothing
moreover to what some people are called. Why, there was a fellow
there--" He pulled up, however, and, thinking better of it, selected
another instance. "The Duchess--weren't you introduced to the
Duchess?--never calls me anything but 'Vanderbank' unless she calls me
'caro mio.' It wouldn't have taken much to make her appeal to YOU with
an 'I say, Longdon!' I can quite hear her."

Mr. Longdon, focussing the effect of the sketch, pointed its moral
with an indulgent: "Oh well, a FOREIGN duchess!" He could make his
distinctions.

"Yes, she's invidiously, cruelly foreign," Vanderbank agreed: "I've
never indeed seen a woman avail herself so cleverly, to make up for the
obloquy of that state, of the benefits and immunities it brings with it.
She has bloomed in the hot-house of her widowhood--she's a Neapolitan
hatched by an incubator."

"A Neapolitan?"--Mr. Longdon seemed all civilly to wish he had only
known it.

"Her husband was one; but I believe that dukes at Naples are as thick
as princes at Petersburg. He's dead, at any rate, poor man, a