a maiden of twenty-two, with a thin face and slight angular figure, who was still on her mother’s hands.  The illustrious matches made by her sisters had, in fact, been secured by extravagant dowering, which had left nothing for poor Lady Constance except a miserable three hundred pounds a year, at which paltry figure no man had as yet offered to take her.  The Countess (Dowager) habitually assumed that Marmaduke Lind ardently desired the hand of his cousin; and Constance herself supported tacitly this view; but the Earl was apt to become restive when it was put forward, though he altogether declined to improve his sister’s pecuniary position, having already speculated quite heavily enough in brothers-in-law.

In the August following the Wandsworth concert Lord Carbury began to take his electrical laboratory with such intensified seriousness that he flatly refused to entertain any visitors until the 12th, and held fast to his determination in spite of his mother’s threat to leave the house, alleging, with a laugh, that he had got hold of a discovery with money in it at last.  But he felt at such a disadvantage after this incredible statement that he hastened to explain that his objection to visitors did not apply to relatives who would be sufficiently at home at Towers Cottage to require no attention from him.  Under the terms of this capitulation Marian, as universal favorite, was invited; and since there was no getting Marian down without Elinor, she was invited too, in spite of the Countess’s strong dislike for her, a sentiment which she requited with a pungent mixture of detestation and contempt.  Marian’s brother, the Reverend George Lind, promised to come down in a day or two; and Marmaduke, who was also invited, did not reply.

The morning after her arrival, Marian was awakened at six o’clock by a wagon rumbling past the window of her room with a sound quite different from that made by the dust-cart in Westbourne Terrace.  She peeped out at it, and saw that is was laden with packages of irregular shape, which, judging by some strange-looking metal rods that projected through the covering, she took to be apparatus for Lord Jasper’s laboratory.  From the wagon, with its patiently trudging horse and dull driver, she lifted her eyes to the lawn, where the patches of wet shadow beneath the cedars refreshed the sunlit grass around them.  It looked too fine a morning to spend in bed.  Had Marian been able to taste and smell the fragrant country air she would not have hesitated a moment.  But she had been accustomed to believe that fresh air was unhealthy at night, and though nothing would have induced her to wash in dirty water, she thought nothing of breathing dirty air; and so the window was shut and the room close.  Still, the window did not exclude the loud singing of the birds or the sunlight.  She ventured to open it a little, not without a sense of imprudence.  Twenty minutes later she was dressed.