“I do not know that the family can have any honor left,” said Florence, severely.

“My dear, you have no right to say that.  The Scarboroughs have always held their heads very high in Staffordshire, and more so of late than ever.  I don’t mean quite of late, but since Tretton became of so much importance.  Now, I’ll tell you what I think we had better do.  We’ll go and spend six weeks with your uncle at Brussels.  He has always been pressing us to come.”

“Oh, mamma, he does not want us.”

“How can you say that?  How do you know?”

“I am sure Sir Magnus will not care for our coming now.  Besides, how could that be retiring into private life?  Sir Magnus, as ambassador, has his house always full of company.”

“My dear, he is not ambassador.  He is minister plenipotentiary.  It is not quite the same thing.  And then he is our nearest relative,—­our nearest, at least, since my own brother has made this great separation, of course.  We cannot go to him to be out of the way of himself.”

“Why do you want to go anywhere, mamma?  Why not stay at home?” But Florence pleaded in vain as her mother had already made up her mind.  Before that day was over she succeeded in making her daughter understand that she was to be taken to Brussels as soon as an answer could be received from Sir Magnus and the necessary additions were made to their joint wardrobe.

Sir Magnus Mountjoy, the late general’s elder brother, had been for the last four or five years the English minister at Brussels.  He had been minister somewhere for a very long time, so that the memory of man hardly ran back beyond it, and was said to have gained for himself very extensive popularity.  It had always been a point with successive governments to see that poor Sir Magnus got something, and Sir Magnus had never been left altogether in the cold.  He was not a man who would have been left out in the cold in silence, and perhaps the feeling that such was the case had been as efficacious on his behalf as his well-attested popularity.  At any rate, poor Sir Magnus had always been well placed, and was now working out his last year or two before the blessed achievement of his pursuit should have been reached.  Sir Magnus had a wife of whom it was said at home that she was almost as popular as her husband; but the opinion of the world at Brussels on this subject was a good deal divided.  There were those who declared that Lady Mountjoy was of all women the most overbearing and impertinent.  But they were generally English residents at Brussels, who had come to live there as a place at which education for their children would be cheaper than at home.  Of these Lady Mountjoy had been heard to declare that she saw no reason why, because she was the minister’s wife, she should be expected to entertain all the second-class world of London.  This, of course, must be understood with a good deal of allowance, as the English world at Brussels was much too large to expect to be so received;