“The wretch!” exclaimed Madam Conway, stamping her foot in her wrath, and thinking only of Henry Warner; “I’ll turn him from my door instantly.  My blue satin bodice, indeed!”

“’Twas I, grandma—­’twas I,” interrupted Maggie, looking reproachfully at Theo. “’Twas I who cut up the bodice.  I who brought down the scarlet coat.”

“And I didn’t do a thing but look on,” said Theo.  “I knew you’d be angry, and I tried to make Maggie behave, but she wouldn’t.”

“I don’t know as it is anything to you what Maggie does, and I think it would look quite as well in you to take part of the blame yourself, instead of putting it all upon your sister,” was Madam Conway’s reply; and, feeling almost as deeply injured as Mrs. Jeffrey herself, Theo began to cry, while Maggie, with a few masterly strokes, succeeded in so far appeasing the anger of her grandmother that the good lady consented for the young gentlemen to stay to breakfast, saying, though, that “they should decamp immediately after, and never darken her doors again.”

“But Mr. Douglas is rich,” sobbed Theo from behind her pocket handkerchief—­“immensely rich, and of a very aristocratic family, I’m sure, else where did he get his money?”

This remark was timely, and when fifteen minutes later Madam Conway was presented to the gentlemen in the hall her manner was far more gracious towards George Douglas than it was towards Henry Warner, to whom she merely nodded, deigning no answer whatever to his polite apology for having made himself so much at home in her house.  The expression of his mouth was as usual against him, and, fancying he intended adding insult to injury by laughing in her face, she coolly turned her back upon him ere he had finished speaking, and walked downstairs, leaving him to wind up his speech with “an old she-dragon”!

By this time both the sun and the servants had arisen, the former shining into the disorderly dining room, and disclosing to the latter the weary, jaded Anna, who, while Madam Conway was exploring the house, had thrown herself upon the lounge and had fallen asleep.

“Who is she, and where did she come from?” was anxiously inquired, and they were about going in quest of Margaret when their mistress appeared suddenly in their midst, and their noisy demonstrations of joyful surprise awoke the sleeping girl, who, rubbing her red eyelids, asked for her aunt, and why she did not come to meet her.

“She has been a little excited, and forgot you, perhaps,” answered Madam Conway, at the same time bidding one of the servants to show the young lady to Mrs. Jeffrey’s room.