“It will be very nice,” continued Dora, “to have you to help me to keep my flighty progenitors in order. Now I must go.”
With a nod and a light laugh she closed the library door behind her, having apparently forgotten the sadder events of the visit. But in her basket she had the diary.
CHAPTER XVIII. LIKE SHIPS UPON THE SEA
Be as one that knoweth, and yet holdeth his tongue.
“And, of course, you know every one in the room?” Dora was saying to her cousin as the orchestra struck suddenly into “God bless the Prince of Wales.”
“Good gracious, no!” Miss Mazerod replied; and both young ladies stood up to curtsey to the Royal party.
It was the great artistic soirée of the year, and crowds of nobodies jostled each other in their mad desire to deceive whosoever might be credulous into the belief that they were somebodies.
“Of course,” said Dora, when they were seated again, and the strains of the Welsh air had been suppressed “by desire,” “they may be very great swells; I have no doubt they are in their particular way; but they do not look it.”