longer; but when he wasn't sleepy he was hungry, and when he wasn't
hungry he was tired, and when he wasn't tired he was too actively
employed to think of anything but the business in hand. Happily, at
five-and-twenty it is perfectly possible to postpone being miserable
until a more convenient season; and, though he would have denied it
emphatically afterward, he certainly thought only occasionally of Bijou
at this period, and of Ethel not at all.

Miss Noel heard very regularly from Mrs. Sykes all this while; and that
energetic traveller had not been idle. She had made her new friends
"take her about tremendously," she said. She had seen all the large
towns in that part of the country, and thought them "very ugly and
monotonously commonplace, but prosperous-looking,--like the
inhabitants." The scenery she had found "far too uninteresting to repay
the bother of sketching it." But she had made a few pictures of "the
views most cracked up in the White Mountains,"--where she had been,--"a
sort of second-hand Switzerland of a place; really nothing after the
Himalayas, but made a great fuss over by the Americans." She described
with withering scorn a drive she took there.

"We came suddenly one day upon a party in a kind of Cheap-Jack van," she
wrote,--"gayly-dressed people, tricked off in smart finery, and larking
like a lot of Ramsgate tradesmen on the public road. One of the impudent
creatures made a trumpet of his great ugly fist and spelt out the name
of the hotel at which they were stopping, and then put his hand to his
ear, as if to listen for the response. Expecting _me_ to tell _them_
anything about myself! But I flatter myself that I was a match for them.
I just got out my umbrella and shot it up in their very faces as we
passed, in a way not to be mistaken. And--would you believe it?--the
rude wretches called out, 'The shower is over now! and 'What's the price