fortune should be so important as to make him above suspicion.  That was Lady Maulevrier’s scheme—­to wed wealth to wealth—­to double or quadruple the fortune she had built up in the long slow years of her widowhood, and thus to make her granddaughter one of the greatest ladies in the land; for it need hardly be said that the man who was to wed Lady Lesbia must be her equal in wealth and lineage, if not her superior.

Lady Maulevrier was not a miser.  She was liberal and benevolent to all who came within the circle of her life.  Wealth for its own sake she valued not a jot.  But she lived in an age in which wealth is power, and ambition was her ruling passion.  As she had been ambitious for her husband in the days that were gone, she was now ambitious for her granddaughter.  Time had intensified the keen eagerness of her mind.  She had been disappointed, cruelly, bitterly, in the ambition of her youth.  She had been made to drink the cup of shame and humiliation.  But to this ambition of her old age she held with even greater tenacity.  God help her if she should be disappointed here!

It is not to be supposed that so astute a schemer as Lady Maulevrier had not surveyed the marriage market in order to discover that fortunate youth who should be deemed worthy to become the winner of Lesbia’s hand.  Years ago, when Lesbia was still in the nursery, the dowager had made herself informed of the age, weight, and colours of every likely runner in the matrimonial stakes; or, in plainer words, had kept herself, by her correspondence with a few intimate friends, and her close study of the fashionable newspapers, thoroughly acquainted with the characters and exploits, the dispositions and antecedents, of those half-dozen elder sons, among whom she hoped to find Lesbia’s lord and master.  She knew her peerage by heart, and she knew the family history of every house recorded therein; the sins and weaknesses, the follies and losses of bygone years; the taints, mental and physical; the lateral branches and intermarriages; the runaway wives and unfaithful husbands; idiot sons or scrofulous daughters.  She knew everything that was to be known about that aristocratic world into which she had been born sixty-seven years ago; and the sum-total of her knowledge was that there was one man whom she desired for her granddaughter’s husband—­one man, and one only, and into whose hands, when earth and sky should fade from her glazing eyes, she could be content to resign the sceptre of power.

There were no doubt half-a-dozen, or more, in the list of elder sons, who were fairly eligible.  But this young man was the Achilles in the rank and file of chivalry, and her soul yearned to have him and no other for her darling.