On their way through the hall she stopped him, her hand still in his arm.  Aldous was in front, at the door, looking for a light shawl she had brought with her.

“I should like to thank you,” she said shyly, “about the Hurds.  It will be very kind of you and Mr. Raeburn to find them work.”

Lord Maxwell was pleased; and with the usual unfair advantage of beauty her eyes and curving lips gave her little advance a charm infinitely beyond what any plainer woman could have commanded.

“Oh, don’t thank me!” he said cheerily.  “Thank Aldous.  He does all that kind of thing.  And if in your good works you want any help we can give, ask it, my dear young lady.  My old comrade’s grand-daughter will always find friends in this house.”

Lord Maxwell would have been very much astonished to hear himself making this speech six weeks before.  As it was, he handed her over gallantly to Aldous, and stood on the steps looking after them in a stir of mind not unnoted by the confidential butler who held the door open behind him.  Would Aldous insist on carrying his wife off to the dower house on the other side of the estate? or would they be content to stay in the old place with the old people?  And if so, how were that girl and his sister to get on?  As for himself, he was of a naturally optimist temper, and ever since the night of his first interview with Aldous on the subject, he had been more and more inclining to take a cheerful view.  He liked to see a young creature of such evident character and cleverness holding opinions and lines of her own.  It was infinitely better than mere nonentity.  Of course, she was now extravagant and foolish, perhaps vain too.  But that would mend with time—­mend, above all, with her position as Aldous’s wife.  Aldous was a strong man—­how strong, Lord Maxwell suspected that this impetuous young lady hardly knew.  No, he thought the family might be trusted to cope with her when once they got her among them.  And she would certainly be an ornament to the old house.

Her father of course was, and would be, the real difficulty, and the blight which had descended on the once honoured name.  But a man so conscious of many kinds of power as Lord Maxwell could not feel much doubt as to his own and his grandson’s competence to keep so poor a specimen of humanity as Richard Boyce in his place.  How wretchedly ill, how feeble, both in body and soul, the fellow had looked when he and Winterbourne met him!

The white-haired owner of the Court walked back slowly to his library, his hands in his pockets, his head bent in cogitation.  Impossible to settle to the various important political letters lying on his table, and bearing all of them on that approaching crisis in the spring which must put Lord Maxwell and his friends in power.  He was over seventy, but his old blood quickened within him as he thought of those two on this golden afternoon, among the beech woods.  How late Aldous had left all these experiences!  His grandfather, by twenty, could have shown him the way.