Was he aware of his great distress and difficulties?  Ha, ha! thought so!  Fine lady wife!  No end of children—­served him right!—­to bring down his pride.

Lord Ormersfield hazarded a hint that James had seen his errors, and the school was no longer in the way.

‘No, no!’ said Oliver.  ’Too late now.  Drink as he has brewed.  He should have thought twice before he broke my poor mother’s heart with his cantankerous ways.  Cheveleigh beneath him, forsooth!  I’m not going to have it cut up for a lot of trumpery girls!  I’ve settled the property and whatever other pickings there may be upon my little Clara—­grateful, and worthy of it!  Her husband shall take Dynevor name and arms—­unless, to be sure, he had a title of his own.  The girl was much admired at Rome last winter, had a fair offer or two, but not a word will she say to any of them.  I can’t tell what’s in her head, not I!’

And he looked knowingly at Lord Ormersfield, and willingly extended his stay at Aix-la-Chapelle, letting Fitzjocelyn organize expeditions from thence to Liege and other places in the neighbourhood.

The two cousins were so glad to be together, and the Earl so much pleased that Louis should have anything which gave him so much delight as this meeting with his old playfellow, that he did all in his power to facilitate and prolong their intercourse.  He often sacrificed himself to Oliver’s prosings on the Equatorial navigation, that the two young people might be at liberty; and he invited Clara to their early breakfast and walk before her uncle wanted her in the morning.  These were Clara’s times of greatest happiness, except that it gave her a new and strange sensation to be talked to by his lordship like a grown-up—­nay, a sensible woman.  Once she said to herself, laughing, ’He really treats me almost as if I were poor Mary herself.’  And then came another flash:  ’Perhaps he would even like me on the same terms!’ And then she laughed again, and shook her head:  ’No, no, my Lord, your son is much too good for that!  Uncle Oliver would not have looked so benignant at us when we were sitting in the gardens last night, if he had known that I was giving Louis all my Lima letters.  I wish they were more worth having!  It was very stupid of me not to know Mary better, so that we write like two old almanacs.  However, my letter from hence will be worth its journey to Peru.’

Clara’s heart was several degrees lighter, both from the pleasure of the meeting and a suggestion of the Earl’s, upon which she had at once acted, and which seemed, even as she laid pen to paper, to bring her somewhat nearer to her brother.