e?" This latter demand was made with
great stress, as though she had been defrauded in the matter of the
cannon, and was obeyed. Before long, the Duchess, with her partner,
Lady Glencora, won the game,--which fact, however, was, I think,
owing rather to Alice's ignorance than to her Grace's skill. The
Duchess, however, was very triumphant, and made her way back into the
drawing-room with a step which seemed to declare loudly that she had
trumped Mrs Sparkes at last.

Not long after this the ladies went up-stairs on their way to bed.
Many of them, perhaps, did not go to their pillows at once, as it was
as yet not eleven o'clock, and it was past ten when they all came
down to breakfast. At any rate, Alice, who had been up at seven, did
not go to bed then, nor for the next two hours. "I'll come into your
room just for one minute," Lady Glencora said as she passed on from
the door to her own room; and in about five minutes she was back with
her cousin. "Would you mind going into my room--it's just there, and
sitting with Ellen for a minute?" This Lady Glencora said in the
sweetest possible tone to the girl who was waiting on Alice; and
then, when they were alone together, she got into a little chair by
the fireside and prepared herself for conversation.

"I must keep you up for a quarter of an hour while I tell you
something. But first of all, how do you like the people? Will you
be able to be comfortable with them?" Alice of course said that
she thought she would; and then there came that little discussion
in which the duties of Mr Bott, the man with the red hair, were
described.

"But I've got something to tell you," said Lady Glencora, when they
had already been there some twenty minutes. "Sit down opposite to me,
and look at the fire while I look at you."

"Is it anything terrible?"

"It's nothing wrong."

"Oh, Lady Glencora, if it's--"

"I won't have you call me Lady Glencora. Don't I call you Alice? Why
are you so unkind to me? I have not come to you now asking you to do
for me anything that you ought not to do."

"But you are going to tell me something." Alice felt sure that the
thing to be told would have some reference to Mr Fitzgerald, and she
did not wish to hear Mr Fitzgerald's name from her cousin's lips.

"Tell you something;--of course I am. I'm going to tell you
that,--that in writing to you the other day I wrote a fib. But it
wasn't that I wished to deceive you;--only I couldn't say it all in
a