“Hearts!—­ah, well, it’s possible.  I don’t say no; I’ve not discovered them,” Lord Adderwood observed.

They are rarely discovered in the haunts he frequented.

Her allusion to Mrs. Lawrence Finchley rapped him smartly, and she admired his impassiveness under the stroke.  Such a spectacle was one of her pleasures.

Lady Charlotte mentioned incidentally her want of a tutor for her grandson Leo during the winter holidays.  He suggested an application to the clergyman of her parish.  She was at feud with the Rev. Stephen Hampton-Evey, and would not take, she said, a man to be a bootblack in her backyard or a woman a scullery-wench in her kitchen upon his recommendation.  She described the person of Mr. Hampton-Evey, his manner of speech, general opinions, professional doctrines; rolled him into a ball and bowled him, with a shrug for lamentation, over the decay of the good old order of manly English Protestant clergymen, who drank their port, bothered nobody about belief, abstained from preaching their sermon, if requested; were capital fellows in the hunting-field, too; for if they came, they had the spur to hunt in the devil’s despite.  Now we are going to have a kind of bitter, clawed, forked female, in vestments over breeches.  “How do you like that bundling of the sexes?”

Lord Adderwood liked the lines of division to be strictly and invitingly definite.  He was thinking, as he reviewed the frittered appearance of the Rev. Stephen Hampton-Evey in Lady Charlotte’s hinds, of the possibility that Lord Ormont, who was reputed to fear nobody, feared her.  In which case, the handsome young woman passing among his associates as the pseudo Lady Ormont might be the real one after all, and Isabella Lawrence Finchley prove right in the warning she gave to dogs of chase.

The tutor required by Lady Charlotte was found for her by Mr. Abner.  Their correspondence on the subject filled the space of a week, and then the gentleman hired to drive a creaky wheel came down from London to Olmer, arriving late in the evening.

Lady Charlotte’s blunt “Oh!” when he entered her room and bowed upon the announcement of his name, was caused by an instantaneous perception and refection that it would be prudent to keep her grand-daughter Philippa, aged between seventeen and eighteen, out of his way.

“You are friend of Mr. Abner’s, are you?”

He was not disconcerted.  He replied, in an assured and pleasant voice, “I have hardly the pretension to be called a friend, madam.”

“Are you a Jew?”

Her abruptness knocked something like a laugh almost out of him, but he restrained the signs of it.

“I am not.”

“You wouldn’t be ashamed to tell me you were one if you were?”

“Not at all.”

“You like the Jews?”

“Those I know I like.”

“Not many Christians have the good sense and the good heart of Arthur Abner.  Now go and eat.  Come back to me when you’ve done.  I hope you are hungry.  Ask the butler for the wine you prefer.”