mask from your female vanity! Yet 'tis not for diversion I do’t. No! but all on poor Molly's account, because you grow arrogant and despise her. There, don't deny it, Moll, for she does despise you. What reason can she have to wear a plain cap and love philosophers, except to set herself above the misses who wear pretty shoes and love lords?"

It was Molly's turn to redden and bite her fan. It was true that she had a little of her mother's childish delight in fine company, but even of that she was ashamed before her more austere sister, and she feared Francis had some more particular meaning.

I have not wit nor Essie malice enough to rally with you, sir," she said; "so pray take it we have hauled down our colours, and cease firing."

"Not wit, miss? Demme, not wit?" cried fat young Edward Stone, starting from an open-eyed doze, edging his chair nearer, and settling a cravat which required as much attention as some modern shirt-cuffs. "Gad, though! you've a very pretty wit. Quite enough wit for a lady, say I."

"Why, cousin, how can you tell 'tis always enough?" asked Esther with a smile, turning on her cousin that direct look of hers, which the beaux were apt to feel vaguely uncomplimentary, since it betrayed no consciousness that their approval was of importance to her. "Enough wit for a lady' means, I suppose, enough to exercise a gentleman's wit and not enough to match it." "Just so, miss," returned Mr. Stone, pleased to find himself conversing, for this happened to him very rarely. "Oddso! you take my meaning percisely."

"O cousin!" cried Molly, pouting, "how can you say that, when you know 'twas a compliment you meant me, and no meaning else in it whatever? Sure I'll never forgive you if you let sister go explaining away your pretty speeches to me. Indeed, sir, you shall swear you meant nothing in the world but a compliment to me."

That two young ladies on their promotion might be laughing at a solid and rising young gentleman from the City was an idea too preposterous to occur to a well-regulated mind, so Edward Stone replied by slowly involving himself in manifold excuses and protestations, staring all the time with dull but growing admiration into Cousin Molly's pretty face. It was pleasant to look at it, and pleasant too to show his mother and sisters his masculine independence of their feminine likes and dislikes by openly admiring a Vanhomrigh girl. As to Miss Molly, being

undeniably both a coquette and a tease, it amused her equally to captivate her cousin and to scandalise her aunt.

Meanwhile, Ginckel had hurriedly left the room and flown to the street door to intercept a young man in riding-boots who came lounging past. Presently the boots were heard on the stairs. Ginckel announced "My Lord Mordaunt," and a youth, remarkably tall and also remarkably handsome, entered the room. There was an indifference that amounted to impertinence in the expression of his pale face with the heavy-lidded eyes, as he performed his bow at the door, and after a pause, apparently of doubt whether or not to exert himself so far, extended a limp hand. Mrs. Vanhomrigh had risen as he came in, and breaking through her conversation as though her sister-in-law had suddenly ceased to exist, darted towards him, joy beaming from her bright eyes. Had she not already, in day and night-dreams, embraced him as her son-in-law, and saluted her Molly as Lady Mordaunt ? Her delight in the prospect was frank, but by no means grovelling; for there was no match her girls could achieve fine enough to surprise her, and she was fully as pleased to think Molly would make half of a very pretty couple, as that she would have a coronet on her coach, and eventually the finest pearls in the peerage. For Lord Mordaunt was heir to the Earldom of Peterborough. If the marriage was projected in Ginckel's head, planned down to the wedding-favour in his mother's, and tremblingly dreamed of in little Molly's, there was no reason to suppose the idea of it had found any place whatever in the young man's. He was but twenty, and by no means of an ardent disposition. As he seated himself at Molly's side, totally ignoring his hostess and every one else in the parlour, he smiled languidly as one expecting the curtain to rise on an agreeable comedy; for she was indeed pretty as some gay-feathered bird, this Molly Vanhomrigh, with her sparkling eyes, her soft irregular face, her small rounded figure and white little hands.

Esther disliked Lord Mordaunt. She sat silent and contemplated her sister with a mind full of misgiving. Meantime another person was looking across the room at her herself, somewhat similarly disquieted on her behalf. This was Mr. Erasmus Lewis, the Crown Solicitor, who had joined Lord Mordaunt on the road from Windsor, and entered a little behind him. Mr. Lewis, more courteous than his young acquaintance, paid his devoirs to Mrs. Vanhomrigh, conscious all the time of a certain sealed paper packet in his breast-pocket, superscribed To

Mrs. Esther Vanhomrigh, Junior, at her lodgings in St. James's. It was not the first time that he had brought such a missive, and he knew the quick flush of carnation colour, the proud smile and brightening glance with which it would be received; for was it not written with the very hand of Jonathan Swift, the poet, the wit, the prince of pamphleteers, the chosen companion of brilliant Bolingbroke and all-powerful Harley? Of Swift, at this moment perhaps the most influential commoner in England, not by any accident of position, but by sheer force of his pre-eminent mind, which seemed for a too brief time able to subdue all pettier spirits under it, and weld together the mean and shifting elements of political factions.

"I recognize your flowers, Miss Esther," said Mr. Lewis at length, crossing the room and touching the roses in the beau-pot; "the poor Doctor plucked them last evening in my Lord Peterbrow's garden at Parson's Green, while the rest of us were eating the finest peaches in the world."

"'Twas my guardian spirit whispered him to get 'em for me," cried Essie; "I shall threaten him, if he runs after Mrs. Hyde, I'll recall the kind creature, and then he will munch and crunch,' as he says, and have a bad head."

"Recall it at once, my dear miss," said Mr. Lewis. “You have plenty of reason already. All the men are not out of town that beauty can afford to be thus undefended by her guardian angel." And he clapped his little red heels together, and bowed with his hat on his heart. "Besides, what unsuitable things the guardian angel of a fine young miss must whisper to an elderly divine! No no, you must recall it at once."

Essie made her curtsey in response to his bow, but, sticking two or three flowers in her bodice with a mutinous smile, "Sure, sir, I shall not be so ungrateful to Dr. Swift," she answered. “'Twould be an ill return for my nosegay."

"Miss need not be over-grateful for that," sneered Lord Mordaunt, who had a languid but sincere dislike to Esther. "The old put of a parson deserves no credit for gallantry. A plague on these flowers!' says he, 'I must needs pull 'em, and now what shall I do with 'em? I'll give 'em to a lady,' says he, "'tis ever the best way to rid oneself handsomely of one's rubbish,' and you may guess if Mrs. Hyde or any one else wanted 'em after that. So he sends 'em into town by his Lordship's courier that was just in the saddle coming this road."

"I must own 'twas done somewhat after that fashion,'

Mr. Lewis apologised, "but his Lordship has barely been presented to the Doctor, and seems not familiar with his manner, while I doubt not Miss Essie knows it well."

"That I do, sir, and none pleases me better," cried she, tossing her chin up with a smile, and disdaining to look at Lord Mordaunt. Then to herself triumphantly, "He gathered them for me, whatever they may say."

And she was right, for Swift had thought of her directly he caught sight of the wide border full of late-blooming roses under Lord Peterborough's southern wall. Just such pink roses Esther had worn stuck in her blue bodice when Swift and she had walked in Kensington Gardens one evening last June. What an amusement it was to him to secretly detain Lord Peterborough's courier, to pluck them for her, and then to play "hide-and-seek," as he called it, with the ladies, till each one imagined she had had the refusal of his flowers, and then-well it must be confessed that feeing the courier for his trouble had not amused him at all, but still he had done it.

"Can you not persuade Hess to visit Windsor, Mr. Lewis?" asked Mrs. Vanhomrigh, daintily pettish. "Plague take the child! We had planned the pleasantest jaunt there, to see the Doctor, and to take tea with his Lordship on the way home, and now, if you'll believe me, she won't let us go at all. Lord! Lord! Well may the Doctor call her Governor Huff."

"Mr. Lewis, ma'am, has brought persuasion that cannot be resisted," said Esther, with rose-red cheeks and sparkling eyes, and read out from her opened letter:

"Dr. Swift's compliments and also his duty to the three ladies Van, and he will be obliged to them to know what day they will please to honour his lodgings at Windsor, which he must not call poor, because they are not his own, and because they are very fine, madams all, and within the Castle wall-and so antique and with so fine a prospect from the window they are enough to turn some folks romantick. Ladies, your very humble servant, Dr. Swift, awaits your pleasures."

The letter was dated Windsor, August 20th, 1712. Francis Earle's quick eyes noticed there was another slip of paper inside the letter, which she did not read out. It ran thus:

"TO MISS HESS VANHOM. Pray will Governor Huff accept this? A formal, a humble invitation must I receive, says she. Well, Miss, don't that begin formal and end humble? Besides I want some more

of your coffee, d'ye hear? This is for Miss Essy's private eye: t'other to be shown. 'I cannot be sly,' says she. 'Yes, but you shall be as sly as I please,' says he."

"'Tis plain, child, you must go," cried Madam Van, beaming round on the company. "You see the Doctor won't let you off, though he's the good-naturedest man in the world. We must order the coach early, for there will be the Castle and the Park to visit, and Eton College, and the Doctor's lodgings, and Lord Mordaunt's fine house which we must see, and we might have a water-party too; then there are Mr. Pinchbeck's musical clocks -I wouldn't miss seeing 'em for the world-and then, my dears, we should never pass so near Cousin Purvis at Twittenham without making her our Howdees. 'Twill be a most delightful expedition. You must all come, all, Sister Stone, and never consider of the charges, for I'll treat you every one."

CHAPTER II.

The September sky wore its most stainless blue overhead, deepening round the horizon to a vaporous purple, flecked with the pearl-coloured edges of a few faint clouds. The wide valley of the Thames lay transfigured in the rich light and richer mist of early autumn; an atmosphere through which its familiar heights looked blue, remote, mysterious, as mountains in a dream. Nearer, the sunshine lay broad on the golden stubblefields and smooth water-meadows, where the young grass was shooting green under the grey willows and the shimmering alder thickets that mark the silver windings of the Thames. The belts and masses of distant woodland, blurred in the haze, looked dark almost to blackness, but here and there on the pale-leaved willows and massive elms a splash of yellow gave token of the waning year, and in the hedgerows great clusters of cornel-berries glowed scarlet in the sun. In the lanes, where bush and bank were still hung with trails of gold left behind by the harvest waggons as they passed, the flickering shadows of the leaves pressed as close on each other as ever, and made a pleasant coolness, but the sun beat fiercely on the high road.

"Well, I never was hotter, nor ever shall be, if the Lord will forgive me my sins!" laughed Mrs. Vanhomrigh, waving a big fan that sent a pleasant draught through the stuffy coach. She