“But how do you mean, Mrs. Toplady?” inquired May, losing something of her polish in curiosity.  “Why should my aunt have wanted him to marry Miss Bride?”

“Ah, that I don’t know.  Possibly she thought it, knowing him as she does, really the best thing for him.  Possibly—­one could make conjectures.  But one always can.”

May puzzled over the hint, her brow knitted; Mrs. Toplady regarded her with veiled amusement, wondering whether it would really be necessary to use plainer words.  The girl was not dull, but perhaps her small experience of life, and her generally naive habit of mind, obscured to her what to the more practised was so obvious.

“Do you mean,” said May, diffidently, “that she planned it out of kindness to Miss Bride?  Of course I know that she likes Miss Bride very much.  Perhaps she thought there would never be a better opportunity.”

“It might be so,” replied the other, absently.

“Miss Bride is very nice, and very clever,” pursued May, sounding the words on the thinnest possible note.  “But one didn’t think of her as very likely to marry.”

“No; it seemed improbable.”

There was a pause.  As if turning to quite another subject, Mrs. Toplady remarked: 

“You will have visitors at Rivenoak next week.  Sir William Amys is to be there for a day or two, and Lord Dymchurch—­”

“Lord Dymchurch?”

The girl threw off her air of cold concentration, and shone triumphantly.

“Does it surprise you, May?”

“Oh, I hadn’t thought of it—­I didn’t know my aunt had invited him—­”

“The wonder is that Lord Dymchurch should have accepted,” said Mrs. Toplady, with a very mature archness.  “Did he know, by the bye, that you were going down?”

“I fancy he did.”

Their eyes met, and May relieved her feelings with a little laugh.

“Then perhaps the wonder ceases.  And yet, in another way—­” Mrs. Toplady broke off, and added in a lower voice, “Of course you know all about his circumstances?”

“No, in deed I don’t.  Tell me about him, please.”

“But haven’t you heard that he is the poorest man in the House of Lords?”

“I had no idea of it,” cried May.  “How should I have known?  Really?  He is so poor?”

“I imagine he has barely enough to live upon.  The family was ruined long ago.”

“But why didn’t you tell me?  Does my aunt know?” May’s voice did not express resentment, nor, indeed, strong feeling of any kind.  The revelation seemed merely to surprise her.  She was smiling, as if at the amusingly unexpected.

“Lady Ogram certainly knows,” said Mrs. Toplady.

“Then of course that’s why he does nothing,” May exclaimed.  “Fancy!” Her provincialism was becoming very marked.  “A lord with hardly enough to live upon!  But I’m astonished that he seems so cheerful.”

“Lord Dymchurch has a very philosophical mind,” said the older lady, with gravity humorously exaggerated.