“Do you hear that?” said Mrs. Cockayne, addressing her husband.  “This is your pet, sir, who was so fond of his beetles!  Why, the man would sell the nightingales out of his trees, if he could catch them, I’ve no doubt.”

“The story is a little jarring, I confess,” Pater said.  “But after all, why shouldn’t he sell the flowers also, when he sells the pretty things he writes about them?”

“Upon my word, you’re wonderful.  You try to creep out of everything.  But what is that you were reading, my dear Sophonisba, about the grande occasion near the Louvre Hotel?  I dare say it’s a great deal more interesting than Mr. Karr and his violets.  I haven’t patience with your papa’s affectation.  What was it we saw, my dear, in the Rue Saint Honore?  The ’Butterfly’s Chocolate’?”

“Yes, mamma,” Theodosia answered. “Chocolat du Papillon.  Yes; and you know, mamma, there was the linen-draper’s with the sign A la Pensee.  I never heard such ridiculous nonsense.”

“Yes; and there was another, my dear,” said Mrs. Cockayne, “’To the fine Englishwoman,’ or something of that sort.”

“Oh, those two or three shops, mamma,” said Sophonisba, “dedicated A la belle Anglaise! Just think what people would say, walking along Oxford Street, if they were to see over a hosier’s shop, written in big, flaring letters, ’To the beautiful Frenchwoman!”

Mr. Cockayne laughed.  Mrs. Cockayne saw nothing to laugh at.  She maintained that it was a fair way of putting the case.

Mr. Cockayne said that he was not laughing at his wife, but at some much more ridiculous signs which had come under his notice.

“What do you say,” he asked, “to a linen-draper’s called the ’Siege of Corinth?’ or the ‘Great Conde?’ or the ’Good Devil’?”

“What on earth has La Belle Jardiniere got to do with cheap trowsers, Mr. Cockayne?” his wife interrupted.  “You forget your daughters are in the room.”

“Well, my dear, the Moses of Paris call their establishment the Belle Jardiniere.”

“That’s not half so absurd, papa dear,” Sophonisba observed, “as another cheap tailor’s I have seen under the sign of the ’Docks de la Violette.’”

“I don’t know, my dear; I thought when my friend Rhodes came back from Paris, and told me he had worn a pair of the Belle Jardinieres——­”

“Mr. Cockayne!” screamed his wife.

“Well, unmentionables, my dear—­I thought I should have died with laughter.”

“Sophonisba, my dear, tell us what the paper says about that magnificent shop under the Louvre colonnade; your father is forgetting himself.”

“Dear mamma,” said Sophonisba, “it would take me an hour to read all;” but she read the tit-bits.

“My dears,” said Mrs. Cockayne to her daughters, “it would be positively a sin to miss such an opportunity.”

Mr. Cockayne took up the paper which Sophonisba had finished reading, and running his eye over it, said, with a wicked curling of his lip—­