‘Is it settled?’ asked Lord Fitzjocelyn, as Charlotte opened the door for him.

‘Oh, yes, thank you, my Lord—­’

’But, Charlotte, one thing is decided.  Mrs. Frost can afford no more eau de Cologne.  The first hysterics and you go!’

He passed upstairs, and found Isabel beginning to dismantle the drawing-room—­’Which you arranged for us!’ she said.

A long, deep sigh was the answer, and Louis mused for some moments ere he said—­’It is hard work to say good-bye to trifles with which departed happiness seems connected.’

‘Oh, no!’ cried Isabel, eagerly.  ’With such a home, the happiness cannot be departed.’

‘No, not with such a home!’ said Louis, with a melancholy smile; ’but I was selfish enough to be thinking who hung that picture—­’

‘I don’t think you were the selfish person,’ said Isabel.

‘Patience and work!’ said Louis, rousing himself.  ’Some sort of good time must come,’—­and he quickly put his hand to assist in putting the Dresden shepherd and shepherdess into retirement, observing that they seemed the genii of the place, and he set his mind on their restoration.

‘I do not think,’ said Isabel, as she afterwards narrated this scene to her husband, ’that I ever realized his being so much attached to Mary Ponsonby; I thought it was a convenient suitable thing in which he followed his father’s wishes, and I imagined he had quite recovered it.’

’He did not look interesting enough?  Yes! he was slow in knowing his own mind; but his heart once given there is no recalling it, whatever his father may wish.’

‘Or my mother,’ said Isabel, smiling.

’Ah!  I have never asked you what your party say of him in the London world.’

’They say he quite provokes them by being such a diligent member, and that people debate as to whether he will distinguish himself.  Some say he does not care enough, and others, that he has too many crotchets.’

’Just so!  Public men are not made of that soft, scrupulous stuff, which only hardens and toughens when principle is clear before him.  Well, as to society—­’

’Virginia says he is hardly ever to be had; he is either at the House, or he has something to do for his father; he slips out of parties, and they never catch him unless they are in great want of a gentleman to take them somewhere, and then no one is so useful.  Mamma has been setting innumerable little traps for him, but he marches straight through them all, and only a little tone of irony betrays that he sees through them.  Every one likes him, and the only complaint is, that he is so seldom to be seen, keeping almost entirely to his father’s set, always with his father—­’

’Ay!  I can bear to watch his submission better than formerly.  His attentions are in such perfect good taste that they are quite beautiful; and his lordship has quite ceased snubbing, and begins to have a glimmering that when Louis says something never dreamt of in his philosophy, the defect may be in his understanding, and not in Fitzjocelyn’s.’