But what are we to say of the strange infatuation of the young lady?  No one could tell why she liked him.  It was a craze.  Her family were against it, her intimates, her old nurse—­all would not do; and the oddest thing was, that he seemed to take no pains to please her.  The end of this strange courtship was that he married her; and she came home to Mardykes Hall, determined to please everybody, and to be the happiest woman in England.

With her came a female cousin, a good deal her senior, past thirty—­Gertrude Mainyard, pale and sad, but very gentle, and with all the prettiness that can belong to her years.

This young lady has a romance.  Her hero is far away in India; and she, content to await his uncertain return with means to accomplish the hope of their lives, in that frail chance has long embarked all the purpose and love of her life.

When Lady Mardykes came home, a new leaf was, as the phrase is, turned over.  The neighbours and all the country people were willing to give the Hall a new trial.  There was visiting and returning of visits; and young Lady Mardykes was liked and admired.  It could not indeed have been otherwise.  But here the improvement in the relations of Mardykes Hall with other homes ceased.  On one excuse or another Sir Bale postponed or evaded the hospitalities which establish intimacies.  Some people said he was jealous of his young and beautiful wife.  But for the most part his reserve was set down to the old inhospitable cause, some ungenial defect in his character; and in a little time the tramp of horses and roll of carriage-wheels were seldom heard up or down the broad avenue of Mardykes Hall.

Sir Bale liked this seclusion; and his wife, “so infatuated with her idolatry of that graceless old man,” as surrounding young ladies said, that she was well content to forego the society of the county people for a less interrupted enjoyment of that of her husband.  “What she could see in him” to interest or amuse her so, that for his sake she was willing to be “buried alive in that lonely place,” the same critics were perpetually wondering.

A year and more passed thus; for the young wife, happily—­very happily indeed, had it not been for one topic on which she and her husband could not agree.  This was Philip Feltram; and an odd quarrel it was.

CHAPTER XXII

Sir Bale is Frightened

To Feltram she had conceived, at first sight, a horror.  It was not a mere antipathy; fear mingled largely in it.  Although she did not see him often, this restless dread grew upon her so, that she urged his dismissal upon Sir Bale, offering to provide, herself, for him a handsome annuity, charged on that part of her property which, by her marriage settlement, had remained in her power.  There was a time when Sir Bale was only too anxious to get rid of him.  But that was changed now.  Nothing could now induce