It was a very stylish vehicle, quite the latest thing in town carriages, and it had been bestowed on her ladyship, together with the pair of perfectly matched grays that drew it, by her husband, upon her installation as mistress of his house in Grosvenor Square. “Slap up to the echo,” was what Dysart called it: certainly no other lady owned a more elegant turn-out. To be seen in Hyde Park between the hours of five and six on any fine afternoon during the London season, driving, riding, or even walking, was de rigueur for anyone of high fashion; and before her marriage, when she had sat beside her mama in an oldfashioned landaulet, Nell had frequently envied the possessors of more dashing equipages, and had thought how agreeable it would be to sit behind a pair of high-steppers in a smart barouche, with its wheels picked out in yellow. She had been delighted with the Earl’s gift, exclaiming naively: “Now I shall be all the crack!”

“Do you wish to be?” he had asked her, amused. “Yes,” she replied honestly. “And I think I ought to be, because although Miss Wilby—our governess, you know says that it is wrong to set one’s mind on worldly things, you are all the crack, which makes it perfectly proper, I think, for me to be fashionable too.”

“I am persuaded,” he said, his countenance admirably composed, “that Miss Wilby must perceive it to be your duty, even.”

She was a little dubious about this, but happily recollecting that she was no longer answerable to her governess she was able to put that excellent educationist out of her mind. “You know how people talk of Lord Dorset on his white horse, and Mrs. Toddington with her chestnuts?” she said confidentially. “Now they will talk of Lady Cardross, behind her match-grays! I should not be astonished if my barouche were to draw as many eyes as hers!”

“Nor should I,” agreed his lordship, grave as a judge. “In fact, I should be much astonished if it did not.”