She spoke so like his old Charlotte of the younger days that her brother partly laughed.

’Parliamentary fighting ’s not much to your taste or mine.  They ’ve lost their stomach for any other.  The battle they enjoy is the battle that goes for the majority.  Gauge their valour by that.’

‘To be sure,’ said his responsive sister.  She changed her note.  ’But what I say is, let the nobles keep together and stick to their class.  There’s nothing to fear then.  They must marry among themselves, think of the blood:  it’s their first duty.  Or better a peasant girl!  Middle courses dilute it to the stuff in a publican’s tankard.  It ’s an adulterous beast who thinks of mixing old wine with anything.’

‘Hulloa!’ said the earl; and she drew up.

’You’ll have me here till over to-morrow, Rowsley, so that I may have one clear day at Steignton?’

He bowed.  ‘You will choose your room.  Mr. Weyburn is welcome.’

Weyburn stated the purport of his visit, and was allowed to name an early day for the end of his term of service.

Entering the house, Lady Charlotte glanced at the armour and stag branches decorating corners of the hall, and straightway laid her head forward, pushing after it in the direction of the drawing room.  She went in, stood for a minute, and came out.  Her mouth was hard shut.

At dinner she had tales of uxorious men, of men who married mistresses, of the fearful incubus the vulgar family of a woman of the inferior classes ever must be; and her animadversions were strong in the matter of gew-gaw modern furniture.  The earl submitted to hear.

She was, however, keenly attentive whenever he proffered any item of information touching Steignton.  After dinner Weyburn strolled to the points of view she cited as excellent for different aspects of her old home.

He found her waiting to hear his laudation when he came back; and in the early morning she was on the terrace, impatient to lead him down to the lake.  There, at the boat-house, she commanded him to loosen a skiff and give her a paddle.  Between exclamations, designed to waken louder from him, and not so successful as her cormorant hunger for praise of Steignton required, she plied him to confirm with his opinion an opinion that her reasoning mind had almost formed in the close neighbourhood of the beloved and honoured person providing it; for abstract ideas were unknown to her.  She put it, however, as in the abstract:—­

’How is it we meet people brave as lions before an enemy, and rank cowards where there’s a botheration among their friends at home?  And tell me, too, if you’ve thought the thing over, what’s the meaning of this?  I ’ve met men in high places, and they’ve risen to distinction by their own efforts, and they head the nation.  Right enough, you’d say.  Well, I talk with them, and I find they’ve left their brains on the ladder that led them up; they’ve only