"Where does this rara avis hail from? I never clapped eyes on such a beauty—Miss Seraphin is not a patch on her!"
"Don't be so noisy, dear—Miss Leigh? Yes I heard she was nice-looking."
"Nice-looking!" echoed Kate, contemptuously. "Just wait till you see her. She will be focused by every eye-glass in Brighton when she takes the children out for their constitutional."
"Dear me! I hope she is a proper kind of person."
"She looks rather in the Lady Audley style—and such a complexion! I could have sworn it was painted if it had not varied so. Now I think of it," said Kate, with malice prepense, "she is not at all unlike the photographs, of—,"—naming some one of whose existence she had no business to have been aware.
"It really is too bad of Mrs. Markham not having mentioned this," cried Mrs. Barrington, as if Bluebell had been convicted of a crime. "It is most unpleasant having so voyante a person about the children!"
"Oh, what does it matter," said Kate, heedlessly; "you have no grown up sons. And she seems awfully nice. She has a face with a history in it, though. I shall try and make her out to-morrow. No one is ever so innocent as she looks."
Kate's admiration was still further excited next day as she listened to Bluebell's singing.
"You never heard anything like it, mamma—she could fill Covent Garden; and she composes too. I wonder if she has ever been on the stage?"
Less appreciative was the judgment of the erudite Mabel, who reported Miss Leigh unable to continue her arithmetic beyond the decimal fractions she had attained to with Miss Steele. "In fact," said the child, with deep contempt, "I don't believe she has ever-gone beyond the rule of three herself."