Mrs. Kelvin, who was a sensible, clear-sighted woman enough in the ordinary affairs of life, still cherished a strange preference for the milk-and-water novels and vapid romances of the Minerva Press school, such as had been fashionable when she was a girl; and it was pleasant to see her son reading out this rubbish to her with the gravest air possible, hiding his contempt and weariness under a well-feigned interest in the fortunes and misfortunes of some book-muslin heroine, or some hero with chiselled features who was never anything less than a lord in disguise. Of such books as these Mrs. Kelvin never seemed to tire. It may be that they carried her back for a little while to the days of her youth, when she too was young and blooming; and that when buried in their pages she forgot for a brief hour or two that she was nothing now but a grey-haired woman--old, sickly, and a widow. There were people still alive in Pembridge, to whom the one romantic episode in the life of Barbara Kelvin was known in all its details. It was this:--The present Mathew Kelvin's father had run away with and married Miss Barbara Carstairs, an orphan niece of the late Sir Frederick Carstairs of Wemley, one of the chief magnates for twenty miles round. Miss Carstairs, to be sure, had not a penny that she could call her own, and was living the life of a genteel dependent at Wemley, when young Kelvin--who was passing backwards and forwards between Sir Frederick and his father, in connection with certain law business--persuaded her to elope. But the fact that Miss Carstairs' sole earthly possessions consisted of the clothes on her back and a solitary spade guinea in her purse, by no means lessened the magnitude of the offence of which the audacious young lawyer had been guilty. There was an outcry of horror, accompanied by a turning up of eyes and a holding up of hands, as the news spread from one country house to another; but nothing could be done save to excommunicate the late Miss Carstairs, with "bell, book, and candle," and try to forget that any such creature had ever had an existence.