Miss Holgate--Miss Hampden."

I bowed and smiled, and directed them to convenient seats, the
situation was becoming more and more trying to my inclination to laugh
outright. When we were all three comfortably deposited in our chairs,
Alice Merivale turned her beaming countenance languidly towards me and
remarked that "it was a perfectly lovely aufternoon," and while I
smiled my eager corroboration, her cousin surreptitiously observed,
that it was "fairly delicious."

Then followed exclamations over my long absence, and questions too
numerous ever to require answers, they were much more finished talkers
than their predecessors, and when I thought we had touched upon every
subject which could interest us mutually, Alice asked in a most
insinuating tone if I had "known Florrie Grant before I went away to
to school?"

Florrie and Carrie Grant were the slighted heroines who had just gone
out. Fully alive to the import of her question, I affected a most
placid expression of countenance and voice, and answered that I had
not.

"I thought so," she remarked with an incisive smile, looking
significantly at her cousin, then changing her tone to one of most
provoking haughtiness, she drooped her white lids over a daintily
plush satchel she held between her hands and drawled out a languid

"How do you like her?"

I felt that I was taking in Miss Merivale's tone and words and meaning