Her host was her guardian and relative; and through his agency she had rejected, at the age of twenty, numerous suitors for her hand.  Her eyes were fixed on the ducal coronet; and unfortunately for Francis Denbigh, he was, at the time, the only man of the proper age who could elevate her to that enviable distinction in the kingdom; and an indirect measure of her own had been the means of his invitation to the country.

Like the rest of her young companions, Marian was greatly disappointed on the view of her intended captive, and for a day or two she abandoned him to his melancholy and himself.  But ambition was her idol; and to its powerful rival, love, she was yet a stranger.  After a few struggles with her inclinations the consideration that their united fortunes and family alliances would make one of the wealthiest and most powerful houses in the kingdom, prevailed.  Such early sacrifices of the inclinations in a woman of her beauty, youth and accomplishments, may excite surprise; but where the mind is left uncultivated by the hand of care, the soul untouched by the love of goodness, the human heart seldom fails to set up an idol of its own to worship.  In the Countess of Pendennyss this idol was pride.

The remainder of the ladies, from ceasing to wonder at the manners of Francis, had made them the subject of their mirth; and nettled at his apparent indifference to their society, which they erroneously attributed to his sense of his importance, they overstepped the bounds of good-breeding in manifesting their displeasure.

“Mr. Denbigh,” cried one of the most thoughtless and pretty of the gay tribe to him one day, as Francis sat in a corner abstracted from the scene around him, “when do you mean to favor the world with your brilliant ideas in the shape of a book?”

“Oh! no doubt soon,” said a second; “and I expect they will be homilies, or another volume to the Whole Duty of Man.”

“Rather,” cried a third, with bitter irony, “another canto to the Rape of the Lock, his ideas are so vivid and full of imagery.”

“Or, what do you think,” said a fourth, speaking in a voice of harmony, and tones of the most soothing tenderness, “of pity and compassion, for the follies of those inferior minds, who cannot enjoy the reflections of a good sense and modesty peculiarly his own?”

This might also be irony; and Francis thought it so; but the tones were so soft and conciliating, that with a face pale with his emotions, he ventured to look up and met the eye of Marian, fixed on him in an expression that changed his death-like hue into the color of vermillion.

He thought of this speech; he reasoned on it; he dreamt on it.  But for the looks which accompanied it, like the rest of the party, he would have thought it the cruellest cut of them all.  But that look, those eyes, that voice, what a commentary on her language did they not afford!

Francis was not long in suspense; the next morning an excursion was proposed, which included all but himself in its arrangements.  He was either too reserved or too proud to offer services which were not required.