y does seem to be
happily arranged by Providence that the musty fusty people, and the
nicy spicy people, and the witty pretty people do severally assemble
and get together as they ought to do.

Bertram's next-door neighbour was certainly of the nicy spicy order;
but this did not satisfy him. He would have been very well pleased to
talk to Miss Baker had it not been for the close contiguity of Miss
Waddington; and even her once-removed vicinity would not have made
him unhappy had not that odious man on her left had so much to say
about the village of Emmaus and the Valley of Ajalon.

Now, be it known to all men that Caroline Waddington is our donna
primissima--the personage of most importance in these pages. It is
for her that you are to weep, with her that you are to sympathize,
and at her that you are to wonder. I would that I could find it
compatible with my duty to introduce her to this circle without any
minute details of her bodily and mental charms; but I have already
been idle in the case of Adela Gauntlet, and I feel that a donna
primissima has claims to description which I cannot get over.
Only not exactly now; in a few chapters hence we shall have Miss
Waddington actively engaged upon the scene, and then she shall be
described.

It must suffice now to say that she was an orphan; that since her
father's death she had lived with her aunt, Miss Baker, chiefly
at Littlebath; that Miss Baker had, at her niece's instance, been
to Egypt, up the Nile, across the short desert--(short!) having
travelled from Cairo to Jerusalem,--and that now, thoroughly sick of
the oriental world, she was anxious only to get back to Littlebath;
while Caroline, more enthusiastic, and much younger, urged her to go
on to Damascus and Lebanon, to Beyrout and Smyrna, and thence home,
merely visiting Constantinople and Athens on the way.

Had Bertram heard the terms in which Miss Waddington spoke of the
youth who was so great about Ajalon when she and her aunt were in
their own room, and also the words in which that aunt spoke of him,
perhaps he might have been less provoked.

"Aunt, that Mr. M'Gabbery is an ass. I am sure he has ears if one
could only see them. I am so tired of him. Don't you think we could
get on to Damascus to-morrow?"

"If we did I have no doubt he'd come too." Mr. M'Gabbery had been one
of the party who crossed the desert with them from Cairo.

"Impossible, aunt. The Hunters are ready to start to-morrow, or, if