The things we do!

I
dine in Fitzroy Square to-day with the pretty widow and her daughter, and
am yours always, dear Clive, A. P."


CHAPTER XXIII
In which we hear a Soprano and a Contralto

The most hospitable and polite of Colonels would not hear of Mrs.
Mackenzie and her daughter quitting his house when he returned to it,
after six weeks' pleasant sojourn in Paris; nor, indeed, did his fair
guest show the least anxiety or intention to go away. Mrs. Mackenzie had
a fine merry humour of her own. She was an old soldier's wife, she said
and knew when her quarters were good; and I suppose, since her honeymoon,
when the captain took her to Harrogate and Cheltenham, stopping at the
first hotels, and travelling in a chaise-and-pair the whole way, she had
never been so well off as in that roomy mansion near Tottenham Court
Road. Of her mother's house at Musselburgh she gave a ludicrous but
dismal account. "Eh, James," she said, "I think if you had come to mamma,
as you threatened, you would not have staid very long.


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