ok the tray into the sitting-room; he poured out a cup of tea,
and declared that it was tea fit for the gods.

Pollyooly smiled at his satisfaction, and then said:

"Please, sir: I should like a note to Madame Correlli to say that I
couldn't go to my dancing yesterday because I had to go into the
country. She is so particular."

"Certainly; I will write it after tea," said the Honourable John Ruffin
amiably.

After he had finished his tea he wrote the note and gave it to her.
Then she paid a proud visit to the Post Office Savings Bank and added
to her fattening account the sum of twelve pounds. Undoubtedly the
Osterley family were valuable acquaintances.

Fortified by the exculpatory note from the Honourable John Ruffin,
Pollyooly went next morning to her dancing class with an easy mind.

It had been clear to her friends that the career of housekeeper,
admirably as she discharged its duties, was far inferior to her
abilities; it did not give them nearly full scope. Those friends were
young, and they were alive, keenly alive, to the fact that there is a
steady demand for angels in that sphere of British and German industry
curiously known as musical comedy. They could not conceive that, since
she had to work for a living, Pollyooly's natural grace and the agility
she had acquired in her earlier childhood, at the village of Muttle
Deeping, and still retained, could be put to more agreeable and
profitable use than that of helping to supply this demand for angels,
and so help to raise the British ideal of womanly beauty.

For three mornings in the week therefore, Pollyooly, taking the Lump
with her, went to Madame Correlli's dancing class in Soho; and thanks
to her active early life at Muttle Deeping, was esteemed by that
accomplished lady one of her most promising pupils. It is no wonder
that Pollyooly and her young friend and fiance Lord Ronald
Ricksborough, the heir of the Duke of Osterley, looked forward with
confidence to the day when she should be a shining light of musical
comedy and the proper wife for a British nobleman.

Madame Correlli read the Honourable John Ruffin's note with indulgence,
accepted the excuse, and set Pollyooly to work.

Pollyooly was disinclined to make friends, close friends, of the other
little girls in her class. She was indeed very civil to them, like the
well-mannered child she was; but they did not greatly attract her.
Belonging to hard-working, dancing families, they talk