way home. Scandal said she had talked her husband dead and her daughter silent; and certainly the Hon. Guy Dengelton was safe in the family vault, while Eunice, as a rule, said very little. Mrs. Dengelton knew every one and everything, and, were it the fashion to write memoirs, after the mode of the eighteenth century, she could have produced a book which would have made a sensation, and been suppressed—after the first edition. Owing to her incessant stream of small talk, she was known in society as “The Parrot,” a name which exactly fitted her, as she had a hook nose, beady eyes, and always dressed in gay colors. Add to this description her esprit, as she called it, but which scandal said was French for the vulgar American word “jaw,” and you have a faithful portrait of the most dreaded woman in London.

esprit

Reasons? two! She knew stories about every one, which she retailed to their friends at the pitch of her voice; and she was always hunting for a husband for Eunice. Eldest 22sons had a horror of her, and the announcement that Mrs. Dengelton was to be at any special ball was sufficient to keep all the eligible young men away. Consequently, no one asked “The Parrot” to a dance unless the invitation was dragged out of them; but Mrs. Dengelton was skilful at such work, and went out a good deal during the season. Hitherto she had not been successful in her husband-hunting, as no one would marry Eunice, with the chance of having Mrs. Dengelton as mother-in-law. Crispin certainly was daring enough to pay his addresses, but Crispin had neither name, title, nor family, nothing but his genius, and Mrs. Dengelton therefore frowned on his suit. When Maurice came in for the Roylands estate, his aunt thought it would be splendid for Eunice to marry her first cousin, “just to keep the property in the family,” as Mrs. Dengelton put it, though how such a saying applied in this case it is rather difficult to see. However, The Parrot gladly accepted her nephew’s invitation,—when she arrived, he regretted having asked her—and came down with Eunice, with the firm determination to talk Maurice into matrimony.

22

She was very angry when Crispin arrived, and forbade Eunice to encourage the young man, but she could scarcely turn him out of the house, as she would have liked to do, so put up with his presence as best she could, and never lost an opportunity of saying disagreeable things to him in a covert fashion.

Eunice herself was a charmingly pretty girl, who very much resented the way in which her mother put her up to auction, but, 

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