"DEAR MRS. LIDDELL,--Do help me in a dilemma! We have a box for
Miss St. Germaine's benefit matinee to-morrow, and Lady Alice Mordaunt
wants to come with Fanny and Bea. You know she is not out yet. Now I am
engaged to go with Florence to Lady McLean's garden party at Twickenham.
So may I _depend_ on you to come and chaperon them? If it were my own
girls only, they could go with Ormonde or any one. But Lady Alice is to
be escorted to our house by that incarnation of propriety, Mr.
Errington; so they must have a chaperon. I therefore depend on you.
Luncheon at 1.30. Do not fail. Ever yours affectionately.
E. BURNETT."


Mrs. Liddell folded up the epistle and placed it in its envelope; then
she sat musing. How cruel it would be to break this butterfly on the
wheel of bitter circumstance! It would be irrational, she thought, "to
expect the strength that could submit to and endure the inevitable from
_her_. She will at once suffer more and less than my Katie. Small
exterior things will sting Ada and make her miserable. As long as
Katherine's heart is satisfied all else can be borne; but _her_
conditions are more difficult. Heigho! for material ills there is
nothing so intolerable as debt." She rose and went to her room with the
vague intention of doing some of the hundred and one things which needed
doing, one more than another, as was usual in her busy life, but somehow
the uncertainty and anxiety oppressing her heart made her incapable of
continued action; she was always breaking off to think--and the more she
thought, the more uneasy she grew. If she had worked out the thin vein
of invention and observation which gained her her humble literary
success, one source of income was gone--a source on which she had
reckoned too surely. Then she had not anticipated that her
daughter-in-law would be so expensive an inmate. Self-denial was a thing