“You will ask that handsome girl who lives with them, won’t you?”

“Not the slightest occasion for doing so,” replied her mother, shortly.  Beatrice lifted her eyebrows.

“Why, she is the best-looking woman in all Meadowshire; we cannot leave her out.”

“I know nothing about her, not even her name; she is some kind of poor relation, I believe—­acts as the children’s governess.  We have too many women as it is.  No, I certainly shall not ask her.  Go on to the next, Beatrice.”

“But, mother, she is so very handsome!  Surely you might include her.”

“Dear me, Beatrice, what a stupid girl you are!  What is the good of asking handsome girls to cut you out in your own house?  I should have thought you would have had the sense to see that for yourself,” said Mrs. Miller, impatiently.

“I think you are horribly unjust, mamma,” says Miss Beatrice, energetically; “and it is downright unkind to leave her out because she is handsome—­as if I cared.”

“How can I ask her if I do not know her name?” said her mother, irritably, with just that amount of dread of her daughter’s rising temper to make her anxious to conciliate her.  “If you like to find out who she is and all about her——­”

“Yes, I will find out,” said Beatrice, quietly; “give me the note, I will keep it back for the present.”

“Now, for goodness sake, go on, child, and don’t waste any more time.  Who are coming from town to stay in the house?”

“Well, there will be Lady Kynaston, I suppose.”

“Yes.  She won’t come till the end of the week.  I have heard from her; she will try and get down in time for the ball.”

“Then there will be the Macpherson girls and Helen Romer.  And, as a matter of course, Captain Kynaston must be asked?”

“Yes.  What a fool that woman is to advertise her feelings so openly that one is obliged to ask her attendant swain to follow her wherever she goes!”

“On the contrary, I think her remarkably clever; she gets what she wants, and the cleverest of us can do no more.  It is a well-known fact to all Helen’s acquaintances that not to ask Captain Kynaston to meet her would be deliberately to insult her—­she expects it as her right.”

“All the same, it is in very bad taste and excessively underbred of her.  However, I should ask Captain Kynaston in any case, for his mother’s sake, and because I like him.  He is a good shot, too, and the coverts must be shot that week.  Who next?”

“Mr. Herbert Pryme.”

“Goodness me!  Beatrice, what makes you think of him?  We don’t know anything about him—­where he comes from or who are his belongings—­he is only a nobody!”

“He is a barrister, mamma!”

“Yes, of course, I know that—­but, then, there are barristers of all sorts.  I am sure I do not know what made you fix upon him; you only met him two or three times in town.”