Montagu, the second son, had refused to marry at all, so his mother said; though it was not known that any girls had ever actually asked him. It was understood that he had made money in Africa, though he showed not the slightest inclination to squander it among his relatives; he had even declined to what his mother termed "lend" her five thousand pounds to be spent on "doing up" Holtye, which was the seat the Earl and the Countess principally favoured. Such conduct, she declared, was inhuman, but "so like Montagu." Arthur, the third son, had done best for himself from at least a financial point of view. He had married Mrs. Parkes-Peters, the widow of the contractor who left three millions. It was true that nasty things had been said of some of his most successful contracts; but, after all, the man was dead. It was also true that no one knew who, or what, his widow was before he married her; it was, if possible, even more true that she was older than her second husband. She herself admitted that she was his senior by ten years--the world said it ought to be twenty. But as she proved to be an ideal wife from the point of view of the man who marries for money, such trifles could hardly be said to count. Their friends asserted that she gave him a thousand pounds every time he kissed her--really no husband could want more. And yet both his parents were aware that one need not be hypercritical to be able to see objections even against Arthur's wife. There remained, therefore, to them but one hope--their fourth son, Robert. Theirs must have been a sanguine temperament--when one knew them one felt as if they had only one between them--because, after all their disappointments, they still built on him a castle in Spain, of their own design. It really seemed as if that castle was to be actually reared. Robert had set his affections on Miss Lindsay, and that without the least prompting from either of them; as they knew, from painful experience, in such cases one sometimes had to do such a lot of prompting. They frankly admitted that, looking at the matter as a whole, he could hardly have been expected to do better--to begin with. Cloverlea was quite a nice place, and, as it were, next door to Holtye; there were only nine miles between them. It was kept up in excellent style; the Earl, who was supposed to know something about such things, assured his wife that it probably cost Donald Lindsay at least ten thousand a-year. It was true that its owner was by way of being a curiosity; but then his eccentricities--if they could be called eccentricities--were not of a kind which would be likely to injure his daughter. And she was his only child. In her capacity of young woman nothing whatever could be urged against her; the Earl and Countess were entirely at one in agreeing with Robert that, in that respect, she was all that there was of the most charming. Obviously, when her father died, she would be more than comfortably off. The only