a glance in Miss
Massereene's direction.

Marcia gets successfully through two elaborate fantasies upon the
piano, that require rather more than the correct brilliancy of her
touch to make up for the incoherency of their composition; while Molly
sits apart, dear soul, and wishes with much devoutness that the
inventor of chess had been strangled at his birth.

At ten o'clock precisely Mr. Amherst rises, having lost his game, and a
good deal of his temper, and expresses his intention of retiring
without delay to his virtuous slumbers. Marcia asks Molly whether she
too would not wish to go to her room after the day's fatigue; at which
proposition Molly grasps with eagerness. Philip lights her
candle,--they are in the hall together,--and then holds out his hand.

"Do you know we have not yet gone through the ceremony of shaking
hands?" he says, with a kindly smile, and a still more kindly pressure;
which I am afraid met with some faint return. Then he wishes her a good
night's rest, and she wends her way up-stairs again, and knows the
long-thought-of, hoped-for, much-dreaded day is at an end.

CHAPTER XII.

"The guests are met, the feast is set;
May'st hear the merry din."

--_Ancient Mariner._

"Teddy is coming to-day," is Molly's first thought next morning, as,
springing from her bed, she patters across the floor in her bare feet
to the window, to see how the weather is going to greet her lover.

"He is coming." The idea sends through her whole frame a little thrill
of protective gladness. How happy, how independent she will feel with
her champion always near her! A sneer loses half its bitterness when
resented by two instead of one, and Luttrell will be a sure partisan.
Apart from all which, she is honestly glad at the prospect of so soon
meeting him face to face.

Therefore it is that with shining eyes and uplifted head she takes her
place at the breakfast-table, which gives the pleasantest meal at
Herst--old Amherst being ever conspicuous by his absence at it.

Philip, too, is nowhere to be seen.

"It will be a _tete-a-tete_ breakfast," says Marcia, with a view
to explanation. "Grandpapa never appears at this hour, nor--of
late--does Philip."

"How unsociable!" says Molly, rather disappointed at the latter's
defection. "Do they never come? All the year round?"

"Grandpapa never. But Philip, I presume, will return to his usual
habits once the house begins to fill,--I mean, w