Bessie’s blush was perpetuated.  She would have liked to mention Miss Julia Gardiner, but she felt a restraining delicacy in speaking of what had come to her knowledge in such a casual way, and more than ever ashamed of her own ridiculous mistake.  Suddenly she broke out with an odd query, at the same moment clapping her hands to her traitorous cheeks:  “Do you ever blush at your own foolish fancies?  Oh, how tiresome it is to have a trick of blushing!  I wish I could get over it.”

“It is a trick we get over quite early enough.  The fancies girls blush at are so innocent.  I have had none of that pretty sort for a long while.”

Miss Burleigh looked sympathetic and amused.  Bessie was silent for a few minutes and full of thought.  Presently, in a musing, meditative voice, she said, “Ambition!  I suppose all men who have force enough to do great things long for an opportunity to do them; and that we call ambition.  Harry Musgrave is ambitious.  He is going to be a lawyer.  What can a famous lawyer become?”

“Lord chancellor, the highest civil dignity under the Crown.”

“Then I shall set my mind on seeing Harry lord chancellor,” cried Bessie with bold conclusion.

“And when he retires from office, though he may have held it for ever so short a time, he will have a pension of five thousand a year.”

“How pleasant!  What a grateful country!  Then he will be able to buy Brook and spend his holidays there.  Dear old Harry!  We were like brother and sister once, and I feel as if I had a right to be proud of him, as you are of your brother Cecil.  Women have no chance of being ambitious on their own account, have they?”

“Oh yes.  Women are as ambitious of rank, riches, and power as men are; and some are ambitious of doing what they imagine to be great deeds.  You will probably meet one at Brentwood, a most beautiful lady she is—­a Mrs. Chiverton.”

Bessie’s countenance flashed:  “She was a Miss Hiloe, was she not—­Ada Hiloe?  I knew her.  She was at Madame Fournier’s—­she and a younger sister—­during my first year there.”

“Then you will be glad to meet again.  She was married in Paris only the other day, and has come into Woldshire a bride.  They say she is showing herself a prodigy of benevolence round her husband’s magnificent seat already:  she married him that she might have the power to do good with his immense wealth.  There must always be some self-sacrifice in a lofty ambition, but hers is a sacrifice that few women could endure to pay.”

Bessie held her peace.  She had been instructed how all but impossible it is to live in the world and be absolutely truthful; and what perplexed her in this new character of her old school-fellow she therefore supposed to be the veil of glamour which the world requires to have thrown over an ugly, naked truth.