’If you had gone to church, as you ought to have done, my dear, you would have heard it.’

‘But as I didn’t?’

‘I don’t think the text alone will do you any good.’

‘And probably you forget it.’

‘No, I don’t, my dear.  How do you do, Lord Silverbridge?’

‘He is a Conservative, Miss Cass.’

’Of course he is.  I am quite sure that a young nobleman of so much taste and intellect would take the better side.’

’You forget that all you are saying is against my father and my family, Miss Cassewary.’

’I dare say it was different when your father was a young man.  And your father, too, was not very long since, at the head of a government which contained many Conservatives.  I don’t look upon your father as a Radical, though perhaps I should not be justified in calling him a Conservative.’

‘Well; certainly not, I think.’

’But now it is necessary that all noblemen in England should rally to the defence of their order.’  Miss Cassewary was a great politician, and was one of those who are always foreseeing the ruin of their country.  ’My dear, I will go up and take my bonnet off.  Perhaps you will have tea when I come down.’

‘Don’t you go,’ said Lady Mabel, when Silverbridge got up to take his departure.

‘I always do when tea comes.’

‘But you are going to dine here?’

’Not that I know of.  In the first place, nobody has asked me.  In the second place, I am engaged.  Thirdly, I don’t care about having to talk politics to Miss Cass; and fourthly, I hate family dinners on Sunday.’

’In the first place, I ask you.  Secondly, I know you are going to dine with Frank Tregear, at the club.  Thirdly, I want you to talk to me, and not to Miss Cass.  And, fourthly, you are an uncivil young,—­young,—­young,—­I should say cub, if I dared, to tell me that you don’t like dining with me any day of the week.’

’Of course you know what I mean is, that I don’t like troubling your father.’

’Leave that to me.  I shall tell him you are coming, and Frank too.  Of course you can bring him.  Then he can talk to me when papa goes down to his club, and you can arrange your politics with Miss Cass.’  So it was settled, and at eight o’clock Lord Silverbridge reappeared in Belgrave Square with Frank Tregear.

Earl Grex was a nobleman of a very ancient family, the Grexes having held the parish of Grex, in Yorkshire, from some time long prior to the Conquest.  In saying all this, I am, I know, allowing the horse to appear wholesale;—­but I find that he cannot be kept out.  I may as well go on to say that the present Earl was better known at Newmarket and the Beaufort,—­where he spent a large part of his life in playing whist,—­than in the House of Lords.  He was a grey-haired, handsome, worn-out old man, who through a long life of pleasure had greatly impaired a fortune, which, for an earl, had never been magnificent, and who now