“Oh no, only don’t ask her till I’m gone, and you know she will only come on condition of being allowed to expound.”

“We must have somebody, and now the thing has gone on so long, and will end in three months, the goody element will not do much harm, and, unluckily, most women will not act without it.”

“You have been trying to train Miss Moy.”

“I shall try still, but I can’t get her to take interest in anything but the boisterous side of emancipation.”

“I can’t bear the girl,” said Cecil; “I am sure she comes only for the sake of the horses.”

“I’m afraid so; but she amuses Bob, and there’s always a hope of moving her father through her, though she declares that the Three Pigeons is his tenderest point, and that he had as soon meddle with it as with the apple of his eye.  I suppose he gets a great rent from that Gadley.”

“Do you really think you shall do anything with her?” said Cecil, who might uphold her at home, but whose taste was outraged by her.

“I hope so!  At any rate, she is not conventional.  Why, when I was set free from my school at Paris, and married Bob three months later, I hadn’t three ideas in my head beyond horses and balls and soldiers.  It has all come with life and reading, my dear.”

And a very odd ‘all’ it was, so far; but there was this difference between Bessie Duncombe and Cecil Charnock Poynsett, that the ‘gospel of progress’ was to the one the first she had ever really known, and became a reaching forward to a newly-perceived standard of benevolence and nobleness:  to the other it was simply retrograding, and that less from conviction than from the spirit of rivalry and opposition.

Lady Tyrrell with her father and sister were likewise going to leave home, to stay among friends with whom Sir Harry could hunt until the London campaign, when Eleonora was to see the world.  Thus the bazaar was postponed until the return of the ladies in the summer, when the preparations would be more complete and the season more suitable.  The church must wait for it, for nothing like a sufficient amount of subscription had been as yet promised.

There was still, however, to come that select dinner-party at Mrs. Duncombe’s, to which Julius, moved by her zeal and honesty, as well as by curiosity, had promised his presence with Rosamond, “at his peril,” as she said.

They were kept so long at the door of Aucuba Villa that they had begun to doubt if they had not mistaken the day, until the Sirenwood carriage crashed up behind them; and after the third pull at the bell they were admitted by an erect, alert figure,—­a remnant of Captain Duncombe’s military life.