Page:Lady Barbarity; a romance (IA ladybarbarityrom00snai).pdf/165

 This was his chance to repay my insolence. You may be sure he took it, and also that my heart quailed when he held that sinister blue paper up, and asked me whether I did not think it elegant.

"And again would I venture to suggest, my Lady Barbara," says he, "that though the first fall may rest with you, the game is not quite over yet." The man smiled with such a malicious affability that I dropped him a curtsey and swept out in a huff.

That blue paper was my nightmare. It must not go to London, yet how could I give the prisoner up? I desired to eat my cake and yet to keep it, and felt like working myself into a passion because this was impossible. Accordingly, when I repaired to a dish of tea, and to have an eye upon Miss Prue, my mind was both disordered and perplexed. I was grieved to discover that the dowager and my dear Miss Canticle had discarded religious topics for the secular. Miss Prue was pouring into my aunt's receptive ear some most surprising details that presumably adorned the histories of many of the brightest ornaments of our world. And she was doing this with a vivacity that took my breath away.

"God bless me! yes," Miss Prue was saying as I entered, "of course I know my Lady Wensley Michigan. A dreadful woman, madam! Plays at hazard every night till three, and poor Michigan hath to put a new mortgage on his property every morning."

"Never heard anything so monstrous!" cries my aunt in horror, but very anxious nevertheless to