An odd little Sunday-school for the children of the English workmen had been instituted at Rocca Marina, where Maura had always assisted the chaplain’s wife, and Anna and Francie shared the work.  Mysie heard of it with enthusiasm, for, as Ivinghoe told her, she was pining for a breath of the atmosphere, but she came down to enjoy the delights thereof alone, taking Maura’s small class.  Maura was supposed to be doing the polite to Lady Phyllis, but in point of fact Phyllis was lying down in the balcony of her mother’s dressing-room, and Maura was gracefully fanning herself under a great cork tree, while Lord Ivinghoe was lying on the grass.

Francie looked languid, and said it was getting dreadfully hot, but Mrs. Grinstead took no notice, trusting that the cessation of attentions would hinder any feeling from going deeper, so that—-as she could not help saying to herself-—she might not have brought the poor child out of the frying-pan into the fire-—not an elegant proverb, but expressing her feeling!

More especially did it do so, when she found that Lord Rotherwood was so much delighted with the beauty and variety of the marbles of Rocca Marina as to order a font to be made of them for the church that was being restored at Clarebridge, and he, and still more his son, found constant diversion in running over by train from San Remo to superintend the design, and to select the different colours and patterns of the stones as they were quarried out and bits polished so as to show their beauty.  Their ladies often accompanied them, and these expeditions generally involved luncheon at the castle, and often tea at the parsonage, but it might be gradually observed, as time went on, that there was a shade of annoyance on the part of the great house at the preference sometimes unconsciously shown for the society of the smaller one.

Mysie openly claimed Anna as her own friend of some standing, and both she and Phyllis had books to discuss, botanical or geological discoveries to communicate or puzzle out, with Mrs. Grinstead or her nieces.  Lord Rotherwood had many more interests in common with Clement Underwood than with Mr. White, and even the Marchioness, though more impartial and on her guard, was sensible to Mrs. Grinstead’s charm of manner and depth of comprehension.  She patronized Adeline, but respected Mrs. Grinstead as incapable of and insensible to patronage.

That her gentlemen should have found such safe and absorbing occupation in the opposite direction to Monte Carlo was an abiding satisfaction to her, and she did not analyze the charms of the place as regarded her son.  She had seen him amused by other young ladies, as he certainly was now by that Miss White, who was very handsome and very obliging.

She knew and he knew all the antecedents too well for alarm, till one day she saw Maura’s face, as she made him pull down a spray of banksia from the side of a stone wall, and watched the air of gallant courtesy with which he presented it.