. I was sorry for her."

"Upon my word, Polly, I don't see why you should be," cried Miss Patty. "She deserved all she got. I have no patience with bestowing pity and sympathy on such creatures. If she had been an ugly washerwoman, instead of a painted opera-singer, nobody would have had a soft word for her."

"Oh, surely there are plenty of people who would be gentle to an ugly washerwoman, if she needed gentleness," put in Mrs. Hadlow. "And you know, my dear Miss Patty, we are taught to pity all those who stray from the right path."

"As to that, I hope I can pity error as well as my neighbours—in a religious sense," returned Miss Patty with some sharpness. "But this is different. I was speaking as a member of society."

"And the Englishman—was he implicated?" asked Mrs. Bransby, rather from a desire to divert the conversation from a direction fraught with danger to the general harmony than from any special curiosity on the subject.

"No; not exactly implicated," replied Miss Piper. "That is to say, he was not suspected of any unfair play, or anything of that sort; but it was considered disgraceful for him to have been mixed up in these gambling transactions; especially as he was a much older man than the others. And then——"

"And then," continued Miss Patty, "it was not considered exactly creditable, I believe—although perhaps Polly thinks it was; I'm sure I don't know,—it wasn't, most people would say, exactly creditable for a man of family, an English gentleman, to be strolling about the world with a parcel of foreign singers. And he had been doing just that. We heard of his being at Antwerp, and Ghent, and Ostend with them."

"A man of family, do you say? A really well-born man?" said Mrs. Hadlow, sitting suddenly very upright in the energy of her feelings. "How shocking! That really seems to be the worst of all!"

"Well, I suppose we must pity his errors," observed Miss Patty, with some causticity. But Mrs. Hadlow was insensible to the sarcasm; or, at all events, her sense of it was swallowed up by a stronger feeling. "I do think it's a public misfortune," she went on, "when a person on whom Providence has bestowed gentle birth