drove back again through the ready portals, bowled along the smooth tree-shaded road, and deposited its covey of smartly-dressed ladies on the great flight of steps leading to the ponderous doors of Cumnor Towers.  Back again to the town; another picking up of womankind in their best clothes, and another return, and so on till the whole party were assembled either in the house or in the really beautiful gardens.  After the proper amount of exhibition on the one part, and admiration on the other, had been done, there was a collation for the visitors, and some more display and admiration of the treasures inside the house.  Towards four o’clock, coffee was brought round; and this was a signal of the approaching carriage that was to take them back to their own homes; whither they returned with the happy consciousness of a well-spent day, but with some fatigue at the long-continued exertion of behaving their best, and talking on stilts for so many hours.  Nor were Lady Cumnor and her daughters free from something of the same self-approbation, and something, too, of the same fatigue; the fatigue that always follows on conscious efforts to behave as will best please the society you are in.

For the first time in her life, Molly Gibson was to be included among the guests at the Towers.  She was much too young to be a visitor at the school, so it was not on that account that she was to go; but it had so happened that one day when Lord Cumnor was on a ‘pottering’ expedition, he had met Mr. Gibson, the doctor of the neighbourhood, coming out of the farm-house my lord was entering; and having some small question to ask the surgeon (Lord Cumnor seldom passed any one of his acquaintance without asking a question of some sort—­not always attending to the answer; it was his mode of conversation), he accompanied Mr. Gibson to the out-building, to a ring in the wall of which the surgeon’s horse was fastened.  Molly was there too, sitting square and quiet on her rough little pony, waiting for her father.  Her grave eyes opened large and wide at the close neighbourhood and evident advance of ‘the earl’; for to her little imagination the grey-haired, red-faced, somewhat clumsy man, was a cross between an archangel and a king.

’Your daughter, eh, Gibson?—­nice little girl, how old?  Pony wants grooming though,’ patting it as he talked.  ’What’s your name, my dear?  He’s sadly behindhand with his rent, as I was saying, but if he’s really ill, I must see after Sheepshanks, who is a hardish man of business.  What’s his complaint?  You’ll come to our school-scrimmage on Thursday, little girl—­what’s-your-name?  Mind you send her, or bring her, Gibson; and just give a word to your groom, for I’m sure that pony wasn’t singed last year, now, was he?  Don’t forget Thursday, little girl—­what’s your name?—­it’s a promise between us, is it not?’ And off the earl trotted, attracted by the sight of the farmer’s eldest son on the other side of the yard.