‘What do you mean?’ Harriet inquired.

‘Just this,’ the Countess answered in bold English and her eyes were lively, her figure elastic:  ’ We must all of us go down to the old shop and shake his hand there—­every man Jack of us!—­I’m only quoting the sailors, Harriet—­and that’s the way to win him.’

She snapped her fingers, laughing.  Harriet stared at her, and so did Andrew, though for a different reason.  She seemed to be transformed.  Seeing him inclined to gape, she ran up to him, caught up his chin between her ten fingers, and kissed him on both cheeks, saying: 

‘You needn’t come, if you’re too proud, you know, little man!’

And to Harriet’s look of disgust, the cause for which she divined with her native rapidity, she said:  ’What does it matter?  They will talk, but they can’t look down on us now.  Why, this is my doing!’

She came tripping to her tall sister, to ask plaintively ’Mayn’t I be glad?’ and bobbed a curtsey.

Harriet desired Andrew to leave them.  Flushed and indignant she then faced the Countess.

‘So unnecessary!’ she began.  ’What can excuse your indiscretion, Louisa?’

The Countess smiled to hear her talking to her younger sister once more.  She shrugged.

’Oh, if you will keep up the fiction, do.  Andrew knows—­he isn’t an idiot—­and to him we can make light of it now.  What does anybody’s birth matter, who’s well off!’

It was impossible for Harriet to take that view.  The shop, if not the thing, might still have been concealed from her husband, she thought.

‘It mattered to me when I was well off,’ she said, sternly.

’Yes; and to me when I was; but we’ve had a fall and a lesson since that, my dear.  Half the aristocracy of England spring from shops!—­ Shall I measure you?’

Harriet never felt such a desire to inflict a slap upon mortal cheek.  She marched away from her in a tiff.  On the other hand, Andrew was half fascinated by the Countess’s sudden re-assumption of girlhood, and returned—­silly fellow! to have another look at her.  She had ceased, on reflection, to be altogether so vivacious:  her stronger second nature had somewhat resumed its empire:  still she was fresh, and could at times be roguishly affectionate and she patted him, and petted him, and made much of him; slightly railed at him for his uxoriousness and domestic subjection, and proffered him her fingers to try the taste of.  The truth must be told:  Mr. Duflian not being handy, she in her renewed earthly happiness wanted to see her charms in a woman’s natural mirror:  namely, the face of man:  if of man on his knees, all the better and though a little man is not much of a man, and a sister’s husband is, or should be, hardly one at all, still some sort of a reflector he must be.  Two or three jests adapted to Andrew’s palate achieved his momentary captivation.

He said:  ‘Gad, I never kissed you in my life, Louy.’