From this time forward there was a change in Lady Lesbia’s style and manner—­a change very much for the worse, as old-fashioned people thought; but to the taste of some among Lady Kirkbank’s set, the change was an improvement.  She was gayer than of old, gay with a reckless vivacity, intensely eager for action and excitement, for cards and racing, and all the strongest stimulants of fashionable life.  Most people ascribed this increased vivacity, this electric manner, to the fact of her engagement to Horace Smithson.  She was giddy with her triumph, dazzled by a vision of the gold which was soon to be hers.

’Egad, if I saw myself in a fair way of being able to write cheques upon such an account as Smithson’s I should be as wild as Lady Lesbia,’ said one of the damsel’s military admirers at the Rag.  ’And I believe the young lady was slightly dipped.’

‘Who told you that?’ asked his friend.

‘A mother of mine,’ answered the youth, with an apologetic air, as if he hardly cared to own such a humdrum relationship.  ’Seraphine, the dressmaker, was complaining—­wanted to see the colour of Lady Lesbia Haselden’s money—­vulgar curiosity—­asked my old mother if she thought the account was safe, and so on.  That’s how I came to know all about it.’

‘Well, she’ll be able to pay Seraphine next season.’

Lord Maulevrier came back to London directly after his sister’s wedding.  The event, which came off so quietly, so happily, filled him with unqualified joy.  He had hoped from the very first that his Molly would win the cup, even while Lesbia was making all the running, as he said afterwards.  And Molly had won, and was the wife of one of the best young men in England.  Maulevrier, albeit unused to the melting-mood, shed a tear or two for very joy as the sister he loved and the friend of his boyhood and youth stood side by side in the quiet room at Grasmere, and spoke the solemn words that made them one for ever.

The first news he heard after his return to town was of Lesbia’s engagement, which was common talk at the clubs.  The visitors at Rood Hall had come back to London full of the event, and were proud of giving a detailed account of the affair to outsiders.

They all talked patronisingly of Smithson, and seemed to think it rather a wonderful fact that he did not drop his aspirates or eat peas with a knife.

‘A man of stirling metal,’ said the gossips, ’who can hold his own with many a fellow born in the purple.’

Maulevrier called in Arlington Street, but Lady Kirkbank and her protegee were out; and it was at a cricket match at the Orleans Club that the brother and sister met for the first time after Lord Hartfield’s wedding, which by this time had been in all the papers; a very simple announcement: 

’On the 29th inst., at Grasmere, by the Reverend Douglass Brooke, the Earl of Hartfield to Mary, younger daughter of the ninth Earl of Maulevrier.’