He had told her all, and it had but added a reverent, enthusiastic pity and fervour to that admiring love which had been growing up so long, and to which he had set the spark.

His old friend was admitted to share their joy, and was as happy as we were, perhaps doubly so, since he had beheld with despair Harold’s early infatuation and its results, which had made him fear, during those three wretched years, that all the lad’s great and noble gifts would be lost in the coarse excesses of his wild life, with barbarous prosperity without, and a miserable, hardening home.  That he should have been delivered from it, still capable of refinement, still young and fresh enough for a new beginning, had been a cause of great joy, and now that all should be repaired by a true and worthy love, had seemed beyond hope.  We built our castles over the fire that evening, Harold had already marked out with his eye the tract of Neme Heath which he would reclaim; and the little he had already set me on doing among the women and children at the potteries, had filled us with schemes as to what Viola was to carry out.

Some misgivings there were even then.  Lady Diana was not to be expected to like Harold’s L1,200 a year as well as Piggy’s heirship to the Erymanth coronet, or any of the other chances that might befall an attractive girl of twenty.

For coldness and difficulties we were prepared, but not for the unqualified refusal with which she met Harold the next morning, grounding all on the vague term, “circumstances,” preventing his even seeing Viola, and cutting short the interview in the manner of a grande dame whose family had received an insult.

Dermot, however, not only raging, but raving, on his side, assured him of the staunchness of his sister, and her resolve to hold by him through everything; and further, in sundry arguments with his mother, got to the bottom of the “circumstances.”  She had put away from herself the objection to the convict birth and breeding, by being willing to accept Eustace, to whom exactly the same objections applied; and when she called Eustace a man of more education and manners, her son laughed in her face at the comparison of “that idiot” with a man like Harold.

Then came the “past life,” a much more tangible objection, but Dermot was ready there, declaring that whatever Harold had done, considering his surroundings, was much less heinous than his own transgressions, after such a bringing up as his, and would his mother say that nobody ought to marry him?  Besides, to whom had she given Di?  They were not arguments that Lady Diana accepted, but she weakened her own cause by trying to reinforce it with all the Stympson farrago, the exaggeration of which Dermot, after his own meeting with Henry Alison, and with Prometesky to corroborate him, was fully prepared to explode, to the satisfaction even of Lord Eryinanth.