very serious. How would you like me to marry Mr. Neigh?'

Ethelberta could not help laughing with a faint shyness as she asked the
question under the searching east ray. 'He has asked me to marry him,'
she continued, 'and I want to know what you would say to such an
arrangement. I don't mean to imply that the event is certain to take
place; but, as a mere supposition, what do you say to it, Picotee?'
Ethelberta was far from putting this matter before Picotee for advice or
opinion; but, like all people who have an innate dislike to
hole-and-corner policy, she felt compelled to speak of it to some one.

'I should not like him for you at all,' said Picotee vehemently. 'I
would rather you had Mr. Ladywell.'

'O, don't name him!'

'I wouldn't have Mr. Neigh at any price, nevertheless. It is about him
that I was going to tell you.' Picotee proceeded to relate Menlove's
account of the story of Ethelberta's escapade, which had been dragged
from Neigh the previous evening by the friend to whom he had related it
before he was so enamoured of Ethelberta as to regard that performance as
a positive virtue in her. 'Nobody was told, or even suspected, who the
lady of the anecdote was,' Picotee concluded; 'but I knew instantly, of
course, and I think it very unfortunate that we ever went to that
dreadful ghostly estate of his, Berta.'

Ethelberta's face heated with mortification. She had no fear that Neigh
had told names or other particulars which might lead to her
identification by any friend of his, and she could make allowance for
bursts of confidence; but there remained the awkward fact that he himself