“’Twas when we were friends, I’ll have you remember, Mr. Bellairs,” she said, with a toss of her head.

“Ah, but Pamela, let us be friends now,” he spoke with a boyish earnestness which made him infinitely more attractive than in his most dashing mood of sparkishness. “’Tis just for that I have sought you. I want your forgiveness. I want your friendship. Let me see you sometimes, as a friend, a most respectful friend, honoured by your acquaintance. I am a wretched, worthless fellow,” he went on, with a kind of bitter humility. “I can’t even pay you back your loan, now, Pamela. But grant me a chance. Let me show myself better than you have known me. ’Pon honour, it would give me something to hope for, just to think you’d let me see you now and again, in a kindly way; that you had not cast me altogether out of your life.”

It was the acknowledgment that he couldn’t pay her back that softened Miss Pounce’s obduracy towards him. She consented to forgive him, to consider him as a friend, even to admit the possibility that if they met—oh, quite accidentally!—on an off-day, she mightn’t refuse to take a stroll with him in the Green Park.

It would seem as if nothing had changed; as if she was the same too-trusting, foolish girl, and he the same sly, audacious villain; yet, as she determinedly parted from him and hurried out of the garden to her lodging, she knew that there had come a profound alteration into their relations.

Meanwhile the enmity excited in the bosoms of Miss Smithson and Miss Popple against the successful milliner was far from abating. Indeed, the mature young lady who had hoped for Pamela Pounce’s present position had an ever-gathering sense of grievance. What if she had a heavy hand? Were there not solid dowagers and others who preferred substance and money’s worth to your fly-away gossamer nothings?

Between these two important members of Madame Mirabel’s establishment, there had come to be a tacit understanding—though they were far too genteel and high-minded to indulge in anything like a conspiracy—that it was their bounden duty, in dear Madame Mirabel’s interests, to keep a sharp look-out on Miss Pounce, and report any proceeding of hers calculated to injure them.

“As, of course, my dear, poor Anna-Maria,” Clara Smithson would declare of her rich business relative, “is that good-natured that times and times I’ve had to step in, as it were, and save her from herself.”

Miss Popple was too tactful to request specification.

“La, you never say, dear!” she would exclaim, with unflagging emphasis. “And what a good thing it is that she’s got you, the poor kind creature! ’Tis what we all feel.”

The while her private thoughts would run contemptuously: