’Well, yes after a fashion there has, I suppose.  But it is a long story and would not interest Sir Marmaduke.  The wonder is that Dorothy should have been able to stay so long with my aunt.  I will tell it you all some day.’  Sir Marmaduke could not understand why a long story about this man’s aunt and sister should be told to his daughter.  He forgot, as men always do in such circumstances forget that, while he was living in the Mandarins, his daughter, living in England, would of course pick up new interest and become intimate with new histories.  But he did not forget that pressure of the hand which he had seen, and he determined that his daughter Nora could not have any worse lover than the friend of his elder daughter’s husband.

Stanbury had just determined that he must go, that there was no possibility for him either to say or do anything to promote his cause at the present moment, when the circumstances were all changed by the return home of Lady Rowley and Mrs Trevelyan.  Lady Rowley knew, and had for some days known, much more of Stanbury than had come to the ears of Sir Marmaduke.  She understood in the first place that the Stanburys had been very good to her daughter, and she was aware that Hugh Stanbury had thoroughly taken her daughter’s part against his old friend Trevelyan.  She would therefore have been prepared to receive him kindly had he not on this very morning been the subject of special conversation between her and Emily.  But, as it had happened, Mrs Trevelyan had this very day told Lady Rowley the whole story of Nora’s love.  The elder sister had not intended to be treacherous to the younger; but in the thorough confidence which mutual grief and close conference had created between the mother and daughter, everything had at last come out, and Lady Rowley had learned the story, not only of Hugh Stanbury’s courtship, but of those rich offers which had been made by the heir to the barony of Peterborough.

It must be acknowledged that Lady Rowley was greatly grieved and thoroughly dismayed.  It was not only that Mr Glascock was the eldest son of a peer, but that he was represented by the poor suffering wife of the ill-tempered man to be a man blessed with a disposition sweet as an angel’s.  ‘And she would have liked him,’ Emily had said, ’if it had not been for this unfortunate young man.’  Lady Rowley was not worse than are other mothers, not more ambitious, or more heartless, or more worldly.  She was a good mother, loving her children, and thoroughly anxious for their welfare.  But she would have liked to be the mother-in-law of Lord Peterborough, and she would have liked, dearly, to see her second daughter removed from the danger of those rocks against which her eldest child had been shipwrecked.  And when she asked after Hugh Stanbury, and his means of maintaining a wife, the statement which Mrs Trevelyan made was not comforting.  ’He writes for a penny newspaper and, I believe, writes very well,’ Mrs Trevelyan had said.