On the day after this,—­the last day of the Duke’s sojourn at Custins, the last also of the Boncassen’s visit,—­it came to pass that the Duke and Mr Boncassen with Lady Mary and Isabel, were all walking in the woods together.  And it so happened when they were at a little distance from the house, each of the girls was walking with the other girl’s father.  Isabel had calculated what she would say to the Duke should a time for speaking come to her.  She could not tell him of his son’s love.  She could not ask his permission.  She could not explain to him all her feelings, or tell him what she thought of her proper way of getting into heaven.  That must come afterwards if it should ever come at all.  But there was something that she could tell.  ‘We are different from you,’ she said, speaking of her own country.

‘And yet so like,’ said the Duke, smiling;—­’your language, your laws, your habits!’

’But still there is such a difference!  I do not think there is a man in the whole union more respected than father.’

‘I dare say not.’

’Many people think that if he would only allow himself to be put in nomination, he might be the next president.’

‘The choice, I am sure, would to your country honour.’

’And yet his father was a poor labourer who earned his bread among the shipping at New York.  That kind of thing would be impossible here.’

‘My dear young lady, there you wrong us.’

‘Do I?’

’Certainly!  A Prime Minister with us might as easily come from the same class.’

‘Here you think so much of rank.  You are—­a Duke.’

’But a Prime Minister can make a Duke, and if a man can raise himself by his own intellect to that position, no one will think of his father or his grandfather.  The sons of merchants have with us been Prime Ministers more than once, and no Englishman ever were more honoured among their countrymen.  Our peerage is being continually recruited from the ranks of the people, and hence it gets its strength.’

‘Is it so?’

’There is no greater mistake than to suppose that inferiority of birth is a barrier to success in this country.’  She listened to this and to much more on the same subject with attentive ears—­not shaken in her ideas as to the English aristocracy in general, but thinking that she was perhaps learning something of his own individual opinion.  If he were more liberal than others, on that liberality might perhaps be based her own happiness and fortune.

He in all this was quite unconscious of the working of her mind.  Nor in discussing such matters generally did he ever mingle his own private feelings, his own pride of race and name, his own ideas of what was due to his ancient rank with the political creed by which his conduct was governed.  The peer who sat next to him in the House of Lords, whose grandmother had been a washerwoman and whose father an innkeeper,