'Good gracious, my dear, I'd quite forgotten you! Have you had an ice? Do take her to have an ice, Sir John.' (Sir John Berry was the next-door neighbour.) And with that Lady Mickleham is said to have resumed her conversation.
'Did you ever hear anything more atrocious?' concluded Mrs. Hilary. 'I really cannot think what Lord Mickleham is doing.'
'You surely mean, what Lady Mickleham?'
'No, I don't,' said Mrs. Hilary, with extraordinary decision. 'Anything might have happened to that poor child.'
'Oh, there were not many of the aristocracy present,' said I soothingly.
'But it's not that so much, as the thing itself. She's the most disgraceful flirt in London.'
'How do you know she was flirting?' I inquired with a smile.
'How do I know?' echoed Mrs. Hilary.
'It is a very hasty conclusion,' I persisted. 'Sometimes I stay talking with you for an hour or more. Are you, therefore, flirting with me?'
'With you!' exclaimed Mrs. Hilary, with a little laugh.
'Absurd as the supposition is,' I remarked, 'it yet serves to point the argument. Lady Mickleham might have been talking with a friend, just in the quiet, rational way in which we are talking now.'
'I don't think that's likely,' said Mrs. Hilary; and—well, I do not like to say that she sniffed
