After dinner the good dame tried to talk to Rosamond on what she deemed the most congenial subjects; but my Lady Rose had no notion of ‘shop’ at a dinner-party, so she made languid answer that she ‘left all that to the curates,’ and escaped to a frivolous young matron on the other side of the room, looking on while her husband was penned in and examined on his services, and his choir, and his system, and his decorations, and his classes, and his schools, for all or any of which Lady Susan pressed on him the aid of the two daughters she was leaving at Sirenwood; and on his hint that this was beyond his parish, she repeated her strong disapproval of the Vicar of Wil’sbro’, whom she had met at dinner the night before, and besides, the school there had numerous Sunday teachers.

Julius assented, for he had no redundance of the article, and his senior curate had just started on a vacation ramble with a brother; but a sort of misgiving crossed him as he heard Herbert Bowater’s last comic song pealing out, and beheld the pleasingly plain face of a Miss Strangeways on either side of him.  Had he not fought the Eton and Harrow match over again with one of them at dinner? and had not a lawn tennis challenge already passed?

For Lady Tyrrell and Mrs. Charnock Poynsett were to have garden-parties on alternate Wednesdays, and the whole neighbourhood soon followed suit.

“You’ll find nobody at home, Jenny,” said Julius, coming out of a cottage opposite, as she rode up to Mrs. Hornblower’s, on one of the last days of August.  “Nobody—­that is, but my mother.  Can you come up and see her?”

“With all my heart; but I must get down here; I’m sent for one of Herbert’s shirts.  The good boy lets mamma and aunty manage them still!  I believe their hearts would break outright if he took to shop ones, like the rest of them.  Hush, Tartar, for shame! don’t you know me?  Where’s your master?”

“At a garden-party at Duddingstone.  Your mother is better, I see.”

“Yes, thank you—­out driving with papa.  Good Rollo!” as the dignified animal rose from the hearthrug to greet her, waving his handsome tail, and calmly expelled a large tabby cat from the easy-chair, to make room for his friends.  “Well done, old Roll!  Fancy a cat in such company.”

“Herbert’s dogs partake his good-nature.”

“Mungo seems to be absent too.”

“Gone with him no doubt.  He is the great favourite with one of the Miss Strangeways.”

“Which—­Herbert or Mungo?”

“Both!  I might say, I know the young ladies best by one being rapturous about Tartar and the other about Mungo.  Rollo treats both with equally sublime and indifferent politeness, rather as Raymond does.”

“What sort of girls are they?  Herbert calls them ‘awfully jolly.’”

“I’m sorry to say I never can think of any other epithet for them.  For once it is really descriptive.”

“Is it either of them in particular?”