She had put on her old bonnet with a grudge at Elsie; and when Mrs. Phillips appeared in the drawing-room ready for the party to the exhibition in all the splendour of her new one, which really looked lovely, and she lovely in it, and Harriett caught the reflection of both figures in the large mirror, she felt still more dissatisfied with everybody than she had done before.  The gentlemen were ready, and they were just about to start, when a light quick step came to the door, and a little tap was heard.

Harriett opened it, and was delighted to see Elsie holding in her hand the second bonnet completed—­equally beautiful, equally tasteful, and apparently quite as expensive.

“Oh, Alice, how good of you!  What a love of a bonnet!  Come in and see Mr. Hogarth.  Look, Mrs. Phillips—­look at Alice’s clever handiwork.”

And Alice was introduced a little unwillingly into the drawing room to be complimented on her taste and her despatch, and to shake hands with the two gentlemen.  Miss Phillips was too much engrossed with her bonnet, and with the improvement it would make in her appearance, to observe the earnest, anxious looks of her two fancied admirers, as they greeted her sister’s lady’smaid; or that they looked with interest and concern on her tired face, which, though now a little flushed with excitement, bore to those who knew the circumstances traces of having been up very late and very early over her work.

“I knew she could do it,” Harriett whispered to Mr. Brandon, when Alice left the room; “she is so excessively quick.  I never would have said so much about it yesterday, if I had not known she could easily do it; and does not mine look as well as Mrs. Phillips’s?  I said it would.”  And so she accepted Mr. Hogarth’s arm, and went to see the pictures with a better judge than Brandon, in all the triumph of her new bonnet—­the lightest, the most becoming she had ever had in her life:  but her influence with Walter Brandon was lost for ever.  He wished he had had Jane Melville, with her good common sense, or Elsie, with her sweet voice and winning ways, hanging on his arm instead of Mrs. Phillips, who was very uninteresting to him, though her great beauty and excellent style of dress made her an object of interest to other people, and who always enjoyed being well stared at in public places.  But Jane was engaged with her pupils at this time, and Elsie was always kept very busy, so that neither of them could accompany the party, and Francis Hogarth felt disappointed, for he had anticipated the society of one or both of them.

How curiously the egotist, who fancies every one is engrossed with him or with her, would be disappointed if he or she could see the real thoughts of the people about them..  How Harriett Phillips would have started if she could have read the hearts of Hogarth and Brandon, and seen what a very infinitesimal share she had in either.