on must be
rapid. She therefore had no alternative but to entrust him with the
bank-notes at once. "Burgo," she said, "if I find that you deceive me
now, I will never trust you again." "All right," said Burgo, as he
barely counted the money before he thrust it into his breast-pocket.
"It is lent to you for a certain purpose, should you happen to want
it," she said, solemnly. "I do happen to want it very much," he
answered. She did not dare to say more; but as her nephew turned away
from her with a step that was quite light in its gaiety, she almost
felt that she was already cozened. Let Burgo's troubles be as heavy
as they might be, there was something to him ecstatic in the touch of
ready money which always cured them for the moment.

On the morning of Lady Monk's party a few very uncomfortable words
passed between Mr Palliser and his wife.

"Your cousin is not going, then?" said he.

"Alice is not going."

"Then you can give Mrs Marsham a seat in your carriage?"

"Impossible, Plantagenet. I thought I had told you that I had
promised my cousin Jane."

"But you can take three."

"Indeed I can't,--unless you would like me to sit out with the
coachman."

There was something in this,--a tone of loudness, a touch of what he
called to himself vulgarity,--which made him very angry. So he turned
away from her, and looked as black as a thundercloud.

"You must know, Plantagenet," she went on, "that it is impossible for
three women dressed to go out in one carriage. I am sure you wouldn't
like to see me afterwards if I had been one of them."

"You need not have said anything to Lady Jane when Miss Vavasor
refused. I had asked you before that."

"And I had told you that I liked going with young women, and not with
old ones. That's the long and the short of it."

"Glencora, I wish you would not use such expressions."

"What! not the long and the short? It's good English. Quite as good
as Mr Bott's, when he said in the House the other night that the
Government kept their accounts in a higgledy-piggledy way. You see, I
have been studying the debates, and you shouldn't be angry with me."

"I am not angry with you. You speak like a child to say so. Then, I
suppose, the carriage must go for Mrs Marsham after it has taken
you?"

"It shall go before. Jane will not be in a hurry, and I am sure I
shall not."

"She will think you very uncivil; that is all. I told her that she
could go with you when I heard that Miss Va