The earl certainly felt some scruples of conscience at the sacrifice he was making of his ward, and stronger still respecting his ward’s fortune; but he appeased them with the reflection that if his son were a gambler, a roue, and a scamp, Lord Ballindine was probably just as bad; and that if the latter were to spend all Fanny’s money there would be no chance of redemption; whereas he could at any rate settle on his wife a jointure, which would be a full compensation for the loss of her fortune, should she outlive her husband and father-in-law.  Besides, he looked on Lord Kilcullen’s faults as a father is generally inclined to look on those of a son, whom he had not entirely given up—­whom he is still striving to redeem.  He called his iniquitous vices, follies—­his licentiousness, love of pleasure—­his unprincipled expenditure and extravagance, a want of the knowledge of what money was:  and his worst sin of all, because the one least likely to be abandoned, his positive, unyielding damning selfishness, he called “fashion”—­the fashion of the young men of the day.

Poor Lord Cashel! he wished to be honest to his ward; and yet to save his son, and his own pocket at the same time, at her expense:  he wished to be, in his own estimation, high-minded, honourable, and disinterested, and yet he could not resist the temptation to be generous to his own flesh and blood at the expense of another.  The contest within him made him miserable; but the devil and mammon were too strong for him, particularly coming as they did, half hidden beneath the gloss of parental affection.  There was little of the Roman about the earl, and he could not condemn his own son; so he fumed and fretted, and twisted himself about in the easy chair in his dingy book-room, and passed long hours in trying to persuade himself that it was for Fanny’s advantage that he was going to make her Lady Kilcullen.

He might have saved himself all his anxiety.  Fanny Wyndham had much too strong a mind—­much too marked a character of her own, to be made Lady Anything by Lord Anybody.  Lord Cashel might possibly prevent her from marrying Frank, especially as she had been weak enough, through ill-founded pique and anger, to lend him her name for dismissing him; but neither he nor anyone else could make her accept one man, while she loved another, and while that other was unmarried.

Since the interview between Fanny and her uncle and aunt, which has been recorded, she had been nearly as uncomfortable as Lord Cashel, and she had, to a certain extent, made the whole household as much so as herself.  Not that there was anything of the kill-joy character in Fanny’s composition; but that the natural disposition of Grey Abbey and all belonging to it was to be dull, solemn, slow, and respectable.  Fanny alone had ever given any life to the place, or made the house tolerable; and her secession to the ranks of the sombre crew was therefore the more remarked.  If Fanny moped, all Grey Abbey might figuratively be said to hang down its head.  Lady Cashel was, in every sense of the words, continually wrapped up in wools and worsteds.  The earl was always equally ponderous, and the specific gravity of Lady Selina could not be calculated.  It was beyond the power of figures, even in algebraic denominations, to describe her moral weight.