Betty Trevor. Mrs. George de Horne Vaizey

Brompton Square is situated on the north side of Hyde Park, between the Marble Arch and Lancaster Gate, and is as stiff and, for the greater portion of the year, as gloomy in appearance as most of the regions in the neighbourhood. The different sides of the Square differ widely in social status, the northern side being the most, and the eastern side the least, aristocratic and roomy. The largest house of all was a great grey stone edifice, having a stretch of three windows on either side of the heavy oak door. The smallest and shabbiest stood at right angles to it, showing a shabby frontage of two windows to the gardens, and having its front entrance in a side street. Really and truly it could barely claim to belong to the Square at all, though the landlord claimed, and the doctor tenant felt it worth while to pay, a heavy rent for the privilege of printing a fashionable address upon his cards.

Behind the silken curtains and brise-bise of Number 14, the “Pampered Pet” had her residence. At Number 1 the doctor’s big family was so crowded together that Betty was thankful to appropriate a front attic as the only chance of possessing that luxury dear to every girlish heart—“a bedroom to herself!” It was not a luxurious apartment, but it was pretty, as every girl’s bedroom may easily be, if she has the will to make it so. The hemp carpet had long since faded to a nondescript grey, but the pink-washed walls were hung with pictures and photographs, and the owner’s love of beauty and order showed itself in the arrangement of the furniture, and the careful setting out of a few treasured ornaments.

There was no gas in the room, so that Betty was obliged to do her simple dressing for dinner by the aid of a candle, whose flickering beams seemed intent on lighting every corner of the room, and leaving the mirror in inky darkness. It was only within the last three months that Dr. Trevor had left his old-fashioned house in Bloomsbury, hoping that the change of residence would help him in his ambition to extend his practice among a better class of patients. The neighbourhood was new to his family, and none of the residents of the Square had so far taken any notice of their presence. Calling is not usual in London unless there is some personal interest involved, and no doubt the occupants of more aristocratic houses looked down with contempt on the sandwiched row of shabby windows which belonged to them only on sufferance. If the neighbours showed no interest in the doctor’s family, the Trevors, on the contrary, felt a devouring interest in everyone around them. They had invented nicknames for all the residents in the northern row, of which the schoolroom possessed the best view, before they had been a week in their new quarters. A glance at the Directory in their father’s consulting-room would have solved the problem at once, but that was a practical and commonplace method of procedure which made no appeal to their imaginations. Nicknames were a thousand times better, because you could manufacture them to suit!

The two old maiden ladies who lived in Number 15 were Emily and Hannah. Emily was dressy, wore a false front, and always took precedence of her sister, who was small and mousy in demeanour. It was apparent to the meanest intellect that a godmother had bequeathed her fortune to Emily, and that she gave her sister a home and generally supported her, for which generosity Hannah was duly thankful. The two old ladies breakfasted in bed every morning, went out for drives at eleven and three o’clock, (“ambles,” Miles called them in scornful reference to the pace of the sleek old horses), retired to their rooms for naps after lunch, ate a hearty dinner at eight, and settled down for the night at ten o’clock.

It does not require the skill of a Sherlock Holmes to discover such proceedings on the part of our neighbours. The study of electric lights on gloomy autumn days is wonderfully informing! Number 16 was uninteresting—only a stupid man and his wife, who looked like a hundred other men and their wives; and who had tiresome silk curtains drawn across the lower panes of their windows, so that it was impossible

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