word of it."
"I thought it was for your own Parish Magazine?"
Miss Julia at last obliged me with her most facetious and most confidential smile.
"I am not tied down to the Parish Magazine," said she. "There are higher fields. I am not certain that 'His Graceless Grace' is altogether suited to the young--the young parishioner, Mr. Gillon! I must read it over and see. And--yes--I shall invite Mr. Delavoye to come and hear it, before I decide to send it anywhere at all."
The reading actually took place on an evening in May, when the Vicar had accompanied his younger sister up to Exeter Hall; and at the last moment I also received a verbal invitation, delivered and inspired by that rascal Uvo, who declared that I had let him in for the infliction and must bear my share. More justly, he argued that the pair of us might succeed in keeping each other awake, whereas one alone would infallibly disgrace himself; and we had solemnly agreed upon a system of watch-and-watch, by the alternate quarter-of-an-hour, before we presented ourselves at the temporary vicarage after supper.
Miss Julia received us in stiff silk that supplied a sort of sibilant obbligato to a nervous welcome; and her voice maintained a secretive pitch, even when the maid had served coffee and shut the door behind her, lending a surreptitious air to the proceedings before they could be said to have begun. It was impossible not to wonder what the Vicar would have said to see his elderly sister discoursing profane fiction to a pair of heathens who seldom set foot inside his church.
He would scarcely have listened with our resignation; for poor Miss Julia read as badly as she wrote, and never was story opened with clumsier ineptitude than hers. We had sheet upon typewritten sheet about the early life and virtuous vicissitudes of some deplorably dull young female in the east end of London; and in my case slumber was imminent when the noble villain made his entry in the cinnamon waistcoat of the picture at Hampton Court. At that I tried to catch Uvo's eye, but it was already fixed upon the reader's face with an intensity which soon attracted her attention.
"Isn't that your idea of him, Mr. Delavoye?" asked Miss Julia, apprehensively."Well, yes, it is; but it was Sir Godfrey Kneller's first," said Uvo, laughing. "So you took the trouble to go all the way over there to study his portrait, Miss Brabazon?"

"What portrait? All the way over where, Mr. Delavoye?"

Uvo entered into particulars which left the lady's face a convincing blank. She had seen no portrait; it was years since she had been through the galleries at Hampton Court, and then without a catalogue. Uvo seemed to experience so much 

 Prev. P 56/136 next