Frank was evidently of an opinion totally different from that of Miss Oriel.  Miss Oriel, when she found herself tete-a-tete with him, thought it was time to give over flirting; Frank, however, imagined that it was just the moment for him to begin.  So he spoke and looked very languishing, and put on him quite the airs of an Orlando.

’Oh, Mr Gresham, such good friends as you and I may laugh at each other, may we not?’

’You may do what you like, Miss Oriel:  beautiful women I believe always may; but you remember what the spider said to the fly, “That which is sport to you, may be death to me."’ Anyone looking at Frank’s face as he said that, might well have imagined that he was breaking his very heart for love of Miss Oriel.  Oh, Master Frank!  Master Frank! if you act thus in the green leaf, what will you do in the dry?

While Frank Gresham was thus misbehaving himself, and going on as though to him belonged the privilege of falling in love with pretty faces, as it does to ploughboys and other ordinary people, his great interests were not forgotten by those guardian saints who were so anxious to shower down on his head all manner of temporal blessings.

Another conversation had taken place in the Greshamsbury gardens, in which nothing light had been allowed to present itself; nothing frivolous had been spoken.  The countess, the Lady Arabella, and Miss Gresham had been talking over Greshamsbury affairs, and they had latterly been assisted by the Lady Amelia, than whom no De Courcy ever born was more wise, more solemn, more prudent, more proud.  The ponderosity of her qualifications for nobility was sometimes too much even for her mother, and her devotion for the peerage was such, that she would certainly have declined a seat in heaven if offered to her without the promise that it should be in the upper house.

The subject first discussed had been Augusta’s prospects.  Mr Moffat had been invited to Courcy Castle, and Augusta had been taken thither to meet him, with the express intention on the part of the countess, that they should be man and wife.  The countess had been careful to make it intelligible to her sister-in-law and niece, that though Mr Moffat would do excellently well for a daughter of Greshamsbury, he could not be allowed to raise his eyes to a female scion of Courcy Castle.

‘Not that we personally dislike him,’ said the Lady Amelia; ’but rank has its drawbacks, Augusta.’  As the Lady Amelia was now somewhat nearer forty than thirty, and was still allowed to walk,

    ‘In maiden meditation, fancy free,’

it may be presumed that in her case rank had been found to have serious drawbacks.