“The woman who wants to get into Parliament is, to my thinking, a monster; and I would sentence her to stocking-mending for life.  The creature who appears before men in black pantalettes, and other imitations of his dress, should be rigorously held clear of decent houses, until she had learned how to dress herself modestly and becomingly.  The Missy who talked about eating her way to the bar, I would doom to the perpetual duty of cooking chops for hungry lawyers’ clerks.

“But you will have had enough of this.

“Not a word? and you promised so many.  Somebody has whispered a name to me.  It is Charles.  Is that true?  I will never forgive you.

                                               “Ever yours,
          
                                        “CARRIE.”

Emmy never answered, poor girl!

CHAPTER X.

“THE PEOPLE OF THE HOUSE.”

Lucy Rowe would have been fast friends with Carrie Cockayne during their stay in her aunt’s house, had Mrs. Cockayne, on the one hand, permitted her daughter to become intimate with anything so low as “the people of the house,” and had Mrs. Rowe, on the other, suffered her niece to “forget her place.”  But they did approach each other, by an irresistible affinity, and by the easy companionship of common tastes.  While Sophonisba engaged ardently in all the doings of the house, and was a patient retailer of its scandals; and while Mrs. Cockayne was busy with her evening whist, and morning “looks at the shops”—­quiet and retiring Theodosia managed to become seriously enamoured of the Vicomte de Gars, who visited Mrs. Rowe’s establishment, as the unexceptionable friend of the Reverend Horace Mohun.

The young Vicomte was a Protestant; of ancient family and limited means.  Where the living scions of the noble stock held their land, and went forth over their acres from under the ancestral portcullis, was more than even Mrs. Rowe had been able, with all her penetrating power in scandal, to ascertain.  But the young nobleman was Mr. Mohun’s friend—­and that was enough.  There had been reverses in the family.  Losses fall upon the noblest lines; and supposing the Count de Gars in the wine trade—­to speak broadly, in the Gironde—­this was to his honour.  The great man struggling with the storms of fate, is a glad picture always to noble minds.  Some day he would issue from his cellars, and don his knightly plume once more, and summon the vulgar intruders to begone from the Chateau.

As for Mrs. Cockayne, to deny that she was highly contented at the family’s intimacy with a Viscount, would be to falsify my little fragmentary chain of histories.  She wrote to her husband that she met the very best society at Mrs. Rowe’s, extolled the elegant manners and enclosed the photograph of the Vicomte de Gars, and said she really began to hope that she had persuaded “his lordship” to pay them a visit in London.  “Tell Mrs. Sandhurst, my dear Cockayne, that I am sure she will like the Vicomte de Gars.”