Mary was led upstairs to be introduced to the five children, while the gentlemen went over the accounts in Oliver’s room.  Enough had been rescued from the ruin to secure, not wealth, but fair competence; the mines were disposed of to a company which would pay the value by instalments, and all the remainder of the business was in train to be easily wound up by Mr. Ward.  Mr. Dynevor’s gratitude was not overpowering:  he was short and dry, privately convinced that he could have managed matters much better himself, and charging all the loss on Fitzjocelyn’s folly in letting Robson escape.  But, though James was hurt at his unthankfulness, and Lord Ormersfield could have been very angry, the party most concerned did not take it much to heart; he believed he had done his best, but an experienced eye might detect blunders, and he knew it was hard to trust affairs out of one’s own hands.

Even the Earl was glad to escape to the sitting-room, though every one was talking at once, and Mercy the loudest; and Louis, as the children would call him in spite of their mamma, was at once seized on by Kitty to be introduced to ‘our brother.’

‘And what is his name, Kitty?’

‘Woland!’ shouted all the young ladies in chorus.

‘Sir Woland is in the book that mamma did make,’ said Kitty.

Louis looked at Isabel with laughing eyes.

‘It was Uncle Oliver’s great wish,’ she said, ’and we did not wish to remember the days of Sir Hubert.’

Before Lord Ormersfield was quite deafened, Louis recollected that they must show Mary at the House Beautiful; and they took leave.  The Earl begged James to come back to dinner with them, and Louis asked if Clara could not find room in the carriage too.  It was the earnest of what Ormersfield was to be to her henceforth, and she was all delight, and earnestness to be allowed to walk home with James by starlight.  And the evening realized all she could wish.  The gentlemen had their conversation in the dining-room, and Mary and Clara sat on the steps together in the warm twilight, and talked of granny; and Clara poured out all that Mary did not yet know of Louis.

‘I hear you have been in hysterics again,’ had been Lord Fitzjocelyn’s greeting to Charlotte.  ’You are prepared for the consequences.’

Charlotte was prepared.  The mutual pardon had not been very hard to gain, and Tom had only to combat her declarations that it was downright presumptuous for her to have more than master had a year, and her protests that she could not leave her mistress and the dear children in their poverty.  The tidings that they were relieved from their present straits answered this scruple, and Charlotte was a pretty picture of shrinking exultation when she conducted her betrothed to Mrs. Martha, who, however, declared that she would not take his hundred and eighty pounds a year—­no, nor twice that,—­to marry him in that there black beard.