“You are very good about that, my dear.  I don’t see why you shouldn’t go.  It’s very kind of Lady Ushant.  I’ll talk to mamma.”  Then Mary went away to get the breakfast, fearing that before long there would be black looks in the house.

Mr. Masters at once went up to his wife, having given himself a minute or two to calculate that he would let Mary have twenty pounds for the occasion,—­and made his proposition.  “I never heard of such nonsense in my life,” said Mrs. Masters.

“Nonsense,—­my dear!  Why should it be nonsense?”

“Cocking her up with Lady Ushant!  What good will Lady Ushant do her?  She’s not going to live with ladies of quality all her life.”

“Why shouldn’t she live with ladies?”

“You know what I mean, Gregory.  The Mortons have dropped you, for any use they were to you, long ago, and you may as well make up your mind to drop them.  You’ll go on hankering after gentlefolks till you’ve about ruined yourself.”

When he remembered that he had that very morning received a commission from Lord Rufford he thought that this was a little too bad.  But he was not now in a humour to make known to her this piece of good news.  “I like to feel that she has got friends,” he said, going back to Mary’s proposed visit.

“Of course she has got friends, if she’ll only take up with them as she ought to do.  Why does she go on shilly-shallying with that young man, instead of closing upon it at once?  If she did that she wouldn’t want such friends as Lady Ushant.  Why did the girl come to you with all this instead of asking me?”

“There would be a little money wanted.”

“Money!  Yes, I dare say.  It’s very easy to want money but very hard to get it.  If you send clients away out of the office with a flea in their ear I don’t see how she’s to have all manner of luxuries.  She ought to have come to me”

“I don’t see that at all, my dear.”

“If I’m to look after her she shall be said by me;—­that’s all.  I’ve done for her just as I have for my own and I’m not going to have her turn up her nose at me directly she wants anything for herself.  I know what’s fit for Mary, and it ain’t fit that she should go trapesing away to Cheltenham, doing nothing in that old woman’s parlour, and losing her chances for life.  Who is to suppose that Larry Twentyman will go on dangling after her in this way, month after month?  The young man wants a wife, and of course he’ll get one.”

“You can’t make her marry the man if she don’t like him.”

“Like him!  She ought to be made to like him.  A young man well off as he is, and she without a shilling!  All that comes from Ushanting.”  It never occurred to Mrs. Masters that perhaps the very qualities that had made poor Larry so vehemently in love with Mary had come from her intercourse with Lady Ushant.  “If I’m to have my way she won’t go a yard on the way to Cheltenham.”