“I said a word for which I am sorry, and which I should not have said.”

“Never mind the word.  After all, it was a true word.  I do not hesitate to say so now myself, though I will allow no other woman to say it,—­and no man either.  I should have degraded him,—­and disgraced him.”  Madame Goesler now had dropped the bantering tone which she had assumed, and was speaking in sober earnest.  “I, for myself, have nothing about me of which I am ashamed.  I have no history to hide, no story to be brought to light to my discredit.  But I have not been so born, or so placed by circumstances, as make me fit to be the wife of the Duke of Omnium.  I should not have been happy, you know.”

“You want nothing, dear Madame Goesler.  You have all that society can give you.”

“I do not know about that.  I have much given to me by society, but there are many things that I want;—­a bright-faced little boy, for instance, to go about with me in my carriage.  Why did you not bring him, Lady Glencora?”

“I came out in my penitential sheet, and when one goes in that guise, one goes alone.  I had half a mind to walk.”

“You will bring him soon?”

“Oh, yes.  He was very anxious to know the other day who was the beautiful lady with the black hair.”

“You did not tell him that the beautiful lady with the black hair was a possible aunt, was a possible—?  But we will not think any more of things so horrible.”

“I told him nothing of my fears, you may be sure.”

“Some day, when I am a very old woman, and when his father is quite an old duke, and when he has a dozen little boys and girls of his own, you will tell him the story.  Then he will reflect what a madman his great-uncle must have been, to have thought of making a duchess out of such a wizened old woman as that.”

They parted the best of friends, but Lady Glencora was still of opinion that if the lady and the Duke were to be brought together at Matching, or elsewhere, there might still be danger.

CHAPTER LXIII

Showing How the Duke Stood His Ground

Mr. Low the barrister, who had given so many lectures to our friend Phineas Finn, lectures that ought to have been useful, was now himself in the House of Commons, having reached it in the legitimate course of his profession.  At a certain point of his career, supposing his career to have been sufficiently prosperous, it becomes natural to a barrister to stand for some constituency, and natural for him also to form his politics at that period of his life with a view to his further advancement, looking, as he does so, carefully at the age and standing of the various candidates for high legal office.  When a man has worked as Mr. Low had worked, he begins to regard the bench wistfully, and to calculate the profits of a two years’ run in the Attorney-Generalship.  It is the way of the profession, and thus a proper and sufficient