Or if it were the stranger’s evil fate to come in wet weather, he saw only a rain-blotted landscape—­the blurred outlines of grey mountain peaks, scowling at him from the other side of a grey pool.  But if the picture without were depressing, the picture within was always good to look upon, for those oak-panelled or tapestried rooms, communicating by richly-curtained doorways from drawing room to library, from library to billiard room, were as perfect as wealth and taste could make them.  Lady Maulevrier argued that as there was but one house among all the possessions of her race which she cared to inhabit, she had a right to make that house beautiful, and she had spared nothing upon the beautification of Fellside; and yet she had spent much less than would have been squandered by any pleasure-loving dowager, restlessly roving from Piccadilly to the Engadine, from Pontresina to Nice or Monaco, winding up with Easter in Paris, and then back to Piccadilly.  Her ladyship’s friends wondered that she could care to bury herself alive in Westmoreland, and expatiated on the eccentricity of such a life; nay, those who had never seen Fellside argued that Lady Maulevrier had taken in her old age to hoarding, and that she pigged at a cottage in the Lake district, in order to swell a fortune which young Maulevrier would set about squandering as soon as she was in her coffin.  But here they were wrong.  It was not in Lady Maulevrier’s nature to lead a sordid life in order to save money.  Yet in these quiet years that were gone—­starting with that golden nucleus which her husband was supposed to have brought home from India, obtained no one knows how, the Countess had amassed one of the largest fortunes possessed by any dowager in the peerage.  She had it, and she held it, with a grasp that nothing but death could loosen; nay, that all-foreseeing mind of hers might contrive to cheat grim death itself, and to scheme a way for protecting this wealth, even when she who had gathered and garnered it should be mouldering in her grave.  The entailed estates belonged to Maulevrier, were he never such a fool or spendthrift; but this fortune of the dowager’s was her own, to dispose of as she pleased, and not a penny of it was likely to go to the young Earl.

Lady Maulevrier’s pride and hopes were concentrated upon her granddaughter Lesbia.  She should be the inheritress of this noble fortune—­she should spread and widen the power of the Maulevrier race.  Lesbia’s son should link the family name with the name of his father; and if by any hazard of fate the present Earl should die young and childless, the old Countess’s interest should be strained to the uttermost to obtain the title for Lesbia’s offspring.  Why should she not be Countess of Maulevrier in her own right?  But in order to make this future possible the most important factor in the sum was yet to be found in the person of a husband for Lady Lesbia—­a husband worthy of peerless beauty and exceptional wealth, a husband whose own