"Yes, miss. Please--please give it me--at once, please, before it is too late."

"I do not know that I shall," Sophia answered virtuously, from the height of her eighteen years. "Children have no right to receive notes. I ought to give it to your mother." Then, with an unexpected movement, she stooped and possessed herself of the folded scrap of paper. "I am not sure that I shall not," she continued.

Lady Betty's face was piteous. "If you do, I--I shall be sent into the country," she panted. "I--I don't know what they'll do to me. Oh, please, please, will you give it me!"

Sophia had a kindly nature, and the girl's distress appealed to her. But it appealed in two ways.

"No, I shall not give it you," she answered firmly. "But I shall not tell your mother, either. I shall tear it up. You are too young, you little baby, to do this!" And suiting the action to the word, she tore the note into a dozen pieces and dropped them.

Lady Betty glared at her between relief and rage. At last "Cat! Cat!" she whispered with childish spite. "Thank you for nothing, ma'am. I'll pay you by-and-by, see if I don't!" And with a spring, she was back at the front of the box, her laugh the loudest, her voice the freshest, her wit the boldest and most impertinent of all. Sophia, who fancied that she had made an enemy, did not notice that more than once this madcap looked her way; nor that in the midst of the wildest outbursts she had an eye for what happened in her direction.

Sophia, indeed, had food for thought more important than Lady Betty, for the girl had scarcely left her side when Mrs. Northey came to her, shook her roughly by the shoulder--they had direct ways in those days--and asked her in a fierce whisper if she were going to sulk there all the evening. Thus adjured, Sophia moved reluctantly to a front seat at the right-hand corner of the box. Lord P---- had been suppressed, but broken knots of people still lingered before the garden of the box expecting a new escapade. To the right, in the open, fireworks were being let off, and the grounds in that direction were as light as in the day. Suddenly, Sophia's eyes, roving moodily hither and thither, became fixed. She rose to her feet with a cry of surprise, which must have been heard by her companions had they not been taken up at that moment with the arrest of a cutpurse by two thief-takers, a drama which was going forward on the left.

"There's--there's Tom!" she cried, her astonishment extreme, since Tom 

 Prev. P 25/268 next