James and Isabel glanced at each other in amused indignation; and Mrs. Frost entered, tremulous with joy, and her bright hazel eyes lustrous with tears, as she leant on the arm of her recovered son.  He was a little, spare, shrivelled man, drolly like his nephew, but with all the youthfulness dried out of him, the freckles multiplied by scores, and the keen black eyes sunken, sharpened, and surrounded with innumerable shrewd puckers.  The movements were even more brisk, as if time were money; and in speech, the small change of particles was omitted, and every word seemed bitten off short at the end; the whole man, in gesture, manner, and voice, an almost grotesque caricature of all James’s peculiarities.

’Mrs. Roland Dynevor, I presume? said Oliver, as Isabel came forward to meet him.

‘Never so known hitherto,’ returned her husband.  ’My wife is Mrs. James Frost, if you please.’

‘That is over now,’ said Oliver, consequentially; and as his mother presented to him ‘poor Henry’s little Clara,’ he kissed her affectionately, saying, ’Well-grown young lady, upon my word!  Like her father—­that’s right.’

‘Here is almost another grandchild,’ said Mrs. Frost—­’Louis Fitzjocelyn—­not much like the Fitzjocelyn you remember, but a new M.P. as he was then.’

‘Humph!’ said Oliver, with a dry sound, apparently expressing, ’So that is what our Parliament is made of.  Father well?’ he asked.

‘Quite well, thank you, sir.’

Oliver levelled his keen eyes on him, as though noting down observations, while he was burning for tidings of Mary, yet held back by reserve and sense of the uncongeniality of the man.  His aunt, however, in the midst of her own joy, marked his restless eye, and put the question, whether Mary Ponsonby had arrived?

‘Ha! you let her go, did you?’ said Oliver, turning on Louis.  ’I told her father you’d be no such fool.  He was in a proper rage at your letter, but it would have blown over if you had stuck by her, and he is worth enough to set you all on your legs.’

Louis could not bring himself to make any answer, and his mother interrupted by a question as to Dona Rosita.

’Like all the rest.  Eyes and feet, that’s all.  Foolish business!  But what possessed Ormersfield to make such a blunder?  I never saw Ponsonby in such a tantrum, and his are no trifles.’

‘It was all the fault of your clerk, Robson,’ said James; ’he would not refute the story.’

‘Sharp fellow, Robson,’ chuckled Oliver; ’couldn’t refute it.  No; as he told me, he knew the way Ponsonby had gone on ever since his wife went home, and of late he had sent him to Guayaquil, about the Equatorial Navigation—­so he had seen nothing;—­and, says he to me, he had no notion of bringing out poor Miss Ponsonby—­did not know whether her father would thank him; and yet the best of it is, that he pacifies Ponsonby with talking of difficulty of dealing with preconceived notions.  Knows how to get hold of him.  Marriage would never have been if he had been there, but it was the less damage.  Mary would have had more reason to have turned about, if she had not found him married.’