"All of them," returned Neville, with a certain amount of awe in voice and face-"listen!

"My dear Mr. Neville'"-by-the-by, the italics were his, not Mrs. Everard's-"My girls'-GIRLS, Fleming, do you hear?— My girls have promised the dear Vicar to get up some waxworks to help the bazaar which will be held in the Vicarage grounds next month. As neither Augusta nor Hermione have had any experience in the arranging of exhibitions of this kind, and as you are so clever at all these sort of things, we made sure you would come to the rescue and help us out with our task.' You see," remarked the victim with grim irony, "how neatly she contrives to mix herself up with the girls'!"-then went on reading: "So, my dear Mr. Neville, will you come over and dine with us to-morrow quite in a friendly way, and we can talk over the whole thing. 7.30, as usual. Ever yours truly, Gwendoline Everard.” "Well?" asked Fleming, finding that John Neville was looking at him and evidently waiting for a remark of some kind.

"Well"-repeated Neville irritably-" and what the devil am I to do?"

"What should you do? You were just moaning about Portland being the most cruel hole an unfeeling Providence had ever cast you into and here is a delightful change offered to you the very next minute."

"A delightful change," growled Neville; "well, any way, I'm not going to take the delightful change of dining quite in a friendly way with Mamma, and dear Augusta and dearest Hermione. Why, likely enough she'd hook me before I could get clear out of the house."

"Likely enough," returned Fleming, with a brutal lack of feeling; "don't see how you're to get off it, though; no use saying you're engaged; Mamma will know better than that."

But John Neville was pretty well versed in such small subterfuges as help a man out of a dinner engagement which he does not want to accept. "I've got a man dining with me to-morrow night here," he announced, "so that I couldn't go if I wanted ever so much."

"Who's the man?" enquired Fleming with interest.

"I don't know, I haven't asked him yet," returned Neville coolly; "but I suppose I shall have to go over there the next day and see about their blessed wax-works. The thing is--will you go with me? because I don't mean to go alone, not at any price." "Oh, I'll go with you," said Fleming cheerfully; "I'm safe enough from their blandishments."

With a mind thus set at ease, John Neville replied to Mrs. Everard's note.

"I fear," he said, "that you over-rate my accomplishments; but if I am here when the wax-works come off, I shall be charmed to give you any help in my power. I am very sorry that I have a

man dining here to-morrow evening, so that it is impossible for me to accept your kind invitation. But I will come over in the afternoon of the next day, and take my chance of finding you at home."

"I think," said John Neville, when he had read this production to Fleming," that that takes me out of the difficulty very neatly." "I believe I'm on duty the day after to-morrow," said Fleming maliciously.

"Oh, no, you're not. And if you are I'll get Towser to me," answered John Neville with a laugh.

CHAPTER II.

DEAR HERMIONE.

go with

ABOUT four o'clock on the afternoon of the day following that on which Neville had been invited to dine at the Everards', the two friends drove in Neville's little Battlesden car to the house occupied by those interesting and enterprising ladies.

It was not as Neville had growled to his friend "a good ten miles" from Portland, but was, in fact, just half that distance, being about a mile from Weymouth on the Dorchester road. It was a pretty place, ivy-covered and creeper-wreathed, with a pretty garden and tennis ground on one side and on the other was skirted by a hedge which divided the back premises from a neighbour's paddock. It looked a much larger place than it really was, for the house had been added to several times and each addition had been made in the most irregular fashion possible.

As a matter of fact, Fleming never found himself within the doors of Jesmond Cottage without thinking what a cosy and pretty little place it was; he thought so that afternoon as he passed through the low-ceiled square entrance hall with its tasteful arrangements of Zulu shields and assegais and its array of tennis rackets and Nankin plates.

John Neville, on the contrary, gave a disgusted sniff as his eye fell upon a tall drain-pipe which stood in one corner holding a fine collection of bulrushes and plume thistles. All the same, it was, perhaps, not the drain-pipe which was the cause of that sniff, nor yet the bulrushes and plume thistles which stood in it, but rather a bold painting in oils of marsh-mallows which adorned its red side; yes, that was it. The drain-pipe, innocent thing, had been made by the hands of a workman who had no matrimonial designs on John Neville of the Royal Chalkshire Regiment, and against the bulrushes and plume thistles he had certainly no grudge; but the marsh-mallows were the work of dear Augusta, and Augusta and all her works were to John Neville very much what the proverbial red rag is to a bull.

The neat maid had told them that Mrs. Everard was at home, and when the two men went into the drawing-room with its two big bow-windows and its pretty dainty coverings, they found Mrs. Everard and dear Augusta, engaged each in some light and elegant occupation and evidently awaiting them.

Mrs. Everard was a handsome old lady and, as one subaltern was wont to declare after another, if her two daughters had but been like her she might have dwelt in Jesmond Cottage in peace, and troubled herself about nothing but her dinner. She was plump and rosy and smiling, a little specious perhaps what the men up at the Verne in moments of exasperation were apt to call greasy-but still always anxious and willing to make herself pleasant to everybody.

On that occasion she rose from her chair and sailed across the room to welcome the two young men with an air which was an enbrace in itself. "So glad to see you-how good of you to come over so soon; and you, too, Mr. Fleming, are you going to help us?" in a tone as if she would as soon have had expectation of the Cham of Tartary suddenly coming to offer his services in the good cause of wax-works as himself. "How kind of you; come and sit near the window. I am sure you must be tired with your long drive." By this time Augusta had put down her elegant occupation, and came forward to greet the visitors. She did so with an air of finished coquetry which sat very oddly on her gaunt and withered person, and which, while it nearly sent Fleming off into a fit of laughter, had the effect of nearly killing John Neville with unutterable disgust.

"How d'ye do," she enquired, with careless familiarity and another coquettish look at Neville. "You'll find us all quite mad with wax-works on the brain. I tell Hermie that she only wants a few straws in her hair to be as like Ophelia as Ellen Terry."

The remark acted just contrariwise on the two men. Fleming nearly doubled up with a strange internal convulsion, and a-down John Neville's back there crept a chill.

Hermione Everard-OPHELIA-ELLEN TERRY!!! He was too disgusted to speak! Instead he turned to Mrs. Everard, after limply touching Augusta's effusive hand, and found himself a chair near her. She began about the all-important waxworks at once, and whilst he was giving her that polite attention which good manners demanded, the door opened and Hermione entered.

Now Hermione Everard was the gay young kitten of the family, a small thing with soft fluffy yellow hair and sharp little features like a terrier, with a certain downy bloom upon her cheeks such as at a little distance gave her an appearance of youth, though, when you came near to her, you saw that it was not the face of a girl but of a middle-aged woman. Still Hermione had always Deen the gay kittenish young thing in her girlhood, and she

clung to the kittenish ways yet, just as every now and again one meets with an elderly lady, who, in her youth was a beauty and wore ringlets on either side of her pretty cheeks; she would be a great deal prettier and would look many a year younger if she would wear her now less luxuriant hair like ordinary folk, but no, she was a beauty when curls were in and she sticks to them still.

I think Shakespeare was right-and by-the-by he knew a good deal that same gentleman-when he said" Beauty is but a vain and doubtful good," and right hard does it seem to be able to lay aside the little airs and conceits which become youthful beauty well enough. I knew not long ago a beautiful woman, one who had lived out of the world for many a year, who was suddenly bidden to a garden fête in high places, whither it was expedient that she should go. She had been a beauty when real lace veils were worn, set round a poke sort of bonnet and thrown negligently to one side-you may see the exact pattern in Leech's pictures about the end of the forties and the beginning of the fifties, and believe me that woman who had been a beauty and was handsome still, went to that garden fête in a white gown with trails of autumn leaves all over it and she had a real white lace veil set round her bonnet and thrown gracefully to one side. Oh! lost youth, lost youth, what a loss it is--no other loss seems so deeply to touch woman's heart! She was a beautiful woman still, but she looked like a beautiful woman who had been buried for thirty years and but just dug up again!

It was very much the same with Hermione Everard. She had been a gay and sprightly little soul at eighteen and she was still a gay and sprightly little soul at eight-and-thirty, which was a mistake. She came in then with a run and shut the door with a little bang, danced up to Fleming in a breathless disjointed fashion, and put out both her little hands to him.

"Oh! How sweet and lovely of you to come-We are in such a state-We never had to do with any wax-works in our lives! And you know I never could stop still, not for a minute, and I am bound to laugh. Gussie will be very much more useful than I. She's so much more commanding and all that, you know. I remember three years ago when the 200th were here, we had a fancy ball in the town, and Gussie went as Mary, Queen of Scots, and awfully well she looked."

Again that inward convulsion seized Fleming, and he had to bring all his self-control into play to keep the signs of it out of his face.

"And what did you go as, Miss Hermione?" he asked when he could manage to speak.

"Oh! I went as Airy fairy Lilian-out of Tennyson, you know," she replied, picking up a small Persian kitten which was lying asleep on a cushion and making a baby of it-and an idiot

of herself, John Neville said in disgust to himself and aloud to Fleming afterwards-" and mother went as a Spanish lady."

"A very useful dress for a chaperon," put in Mrs. Everard with an air of indulgence towards her little daughter's kittenish ways, which offended John Neville's sense of niceness as much as the kittenish ways had done.

"Have you thought of anything particular to do," he asked, in a loud and passionless voice, of the fair Augusta.

"Oh! we have thought out no end of scenes," returned Augusta readily. "We thought we might manage to have a set of six tableaux and the conventional wax-works at the end; Mrs. Jarley and all that, you know."

"And who is to do Mrs. Jarley?" Neville asked.

"Well, we thought you would be the best for that," Augusta admitted.

"Really? I'm to be Mrs. Jarley," said John Neville grimly. "I'm to be Mrs. Jarley, eh, Fleming?" and then, as Fleming laughed outright, the Devil entered into John Neville's mind, and for a time dwelt there.

CHAPTER III.

NURSERY RHYMES.

DURING the next week or two the preparations for the waxworks went gaily on, much more gaily than might have been expected from the grudging way in which John Neville entered into the scheme for drawing money out of the pockets of the charitable.

He had had some hope of a few days' leave about the time that the bazaar would be open, but he never applied for it or thought of doing so, and instead, day after day, he was to be seen spinning along the road in his little car between the Verne and Jesmond Cottage, and his infectious gaiety concerning the forthcoming wax-works was such that all over the neighbourhood they came before many days to be known as "Neville's wax-works."

Fleming thought he had taken leave of his senses, but, in truth, it was the devil which had temporary possession of John Neville, mind, body, and estate.

He had found at first that "the girls" at Jesmond Cottage had had but very unformed ideas of the manner in which to carry out the arrangements for a public display of themselves (and other people) in the guise of wax-works. Augusta had fancied that Hermione would make a lovely Ophelia or a "Little Sea-maid" out of Hans Christian Andersen! And Hermione had suggested Mary, Queen of Scots' and the young Empress-Queen of Hungary as highly suitable characters for her sister to pourtray.