When these three were gone Lady Lesbia expressed herself strongly upon Maulevrier’s folly in bringing such a person as Mr. Hammond to Fellside.

‘What are we to do with him, grandmother?’ she said, pettishly.  ’Is he to live with us, and be one of us, a person of whose belongings we know positively nothing, who owns that his people are common?’

’My dear, he is your brother’s friend, and we have the right to suppose he is a gentleman.’

‘Not on that account,’ said Lesbia, more sharply than her wont.  ’Didn’t he make a friend, or almost a friend of Jack Howell, the huntsman, and of Ford, the wrestler.  I have no confidence in Maulevrier’s ideas of fitness.’

’We shall find out all about this Mr. Hamleigh—­no Hammond—­in a day or two,’ replied her ladyship, placidly; ’and in the meantime we must tolerate him, and be grateful to him if he reconcile Maulevrier to remaining at Fellside for the next six weeks.’

Lesbia was silent.  She did not consider Maulevrier’s presence at Fellside an unmitigated advantage, or, indeed, his presence anywhere.  Those two were not sympathetic.  Maulevrier made fun of his elder sister’s perfections, chaffed her intolerably about the great man she was going to captivate, in her first season, the great houses in which she was going to reign.  Lesbia despised him for that neglect of all his opportunities of culture which had left him, after the most orthodox and costly curriculum, almost as ignorant as a ploughboy.  She despised a man whose only delight was in horse and hound, gun and fishing-tackle.  Molly would have cared very little for the guns or the fishing-tackle perhaps in the abstract; but she cared for everything that interested Maulevrier, even to the bagful of rats which were let loose in the stable-yard sometimes, for the education of a particularly game fox-terrier.

There was plenty of talk and laughter at the dinner-table, while the Countess and Lady Lesbia conversed gravely and languidly in the dimly-lighted drawing-room.  The dinner was excellent, and both travellers were ravenous.  They had eaten nothing since breakfast, and had driven from Windermere on the top of the coach in the keen evening air.  When the sharp edge of the appetite was blunted, Maulevrier began to talk of his adventures since he and Molly had last met.  He had not being dissipating in London all the time—­or, indeed, any great part of the time of his absence from Fellside; but Molly had been left in Cimmerian, darkness as to his proceedings.  He never wrote a letter if he could possibly avoid doing so.  If it became a vital necessity to him to communicate with anyone he telegraphed, or, in his own language, ‘wired’ to that person; but to sit down at a desk and labour with pen and ink was not within his capacities or his views of his mission in life.

’If a fellow is to write letters he might as well be a clerk in an office,’ he said, ‘and sit on a high stool.’