Lady Selina was shocked by such feminine, girlish weakness, such want of dignity and character, such forgetfulness, as she said to Fanny, of what was due to her own position.  Lady Selina was herself unmarried, and not likely to marry; and why had she maintained her virgin state, and foregone the blessings of love and matrimony?  Because, as she often said to herself, and occasionally said to Fanny, she would not step down from the lofty pedestal on which it had pleased fortune and birth to place her.

She learned, however, by degrees, to forgive, though she couldn’t approve, Fanny’s weakness; she remembered that it was a very different thing to be an earl’s niece and an earl’s daughter, and that the same conduct could not be expected from Fanny Wyndham and Lady Selina Grey.

The two were sitting together, in one of the Grey Abbey drawing-rooms, about the middle of April.  Fanny had that morning again been talking to her guardian on the subject nearest to her heart, and had nearly distracted him by begging him to take steps to make Frank understand that a renewal of his visits at Grey Abbey would not be ill received.  Lord Cashel at first tried to frighten her out of her project by silence, frowns, and looks:  but not finding himself successful, he commenced a long oration, in which he broke down, or rather, which he had to cut up into sundry short speeches; in which he endeavoured to make it appear that Lord Ballindine’s expulsion had originated with Fanny herself, and that, banished or not banished, the less Fanny had to do with him the better.  His ward, however, declared, in rather a tempestuous manner, that if she could not see him at Grey Abbey she would see him elsewhere; and his lordship was obliged to capitulate by promising that if Frank were unmarried in twelve months’ time, and Fanny should then still be of the same mind, he would consent to the match and use his influence to bring it about.  This by no means satisfied Fanny, but it was all that the earl would say, and she had now to consider whether she would accept those terms or act for herself.  Had she had any idea what steps she could with propriety take in opposition to the earl, she would have withdrawn herself and her fortune from his house and hands, without any scruples of conscience.  But what was she to do?  She couldn’t write to her lover and ask him to come back to her!—­Whither could she go?  She couldn’t well set up house for herself.

Lady Selina was bending over her writing-desk, and penning most decorous notes, with a precision of calligraphy which it was painful to witness.  She was writing orders to Dublin tradesmen, and each order might have been printed in the Complete Letter-Writer, as a specimen of the manner in which young ladies should address such correspondents.  Fanny had a volume of French poetry in her hand, but had it been Greek prose it would have given her equal occupation and amusement.  It had been in her hands half-an-hour, and she had not read a line.