If it _should_ be! Anne Hautton would have nothing to say after _that_! And Lady Marabout, though she was the most amiable lady in Christendom, was not exempt from a feeling of longing for a stone to roll to the door of her enemy's stronghold, or a flourish of trumpets to silence the boastful and triumphant _fanfare_ that was perpetually sounding at sight of her defeats from her opponent's ramparts. Wild, visionary, guiltily scheming, sinfully revolutionary seemed such a project in her eyes. Still, how tempting! It would be a terrible blow to Valencia, who'd tried for Goodwood fruitlessly, to be eclipsed by this unknown Flora; it would be a terrible blow to their Graces of Doncaster, who held nobody good enough, heraldically speaking, for their heir-apparent, to see him give the best coronet in England to a bewitching little interloper, sans money, birth, or rank. "They wouldn't like it, of course; I shouldn't like it for Philip, for instance, though she's a very sweet little thing; all the Ascottes would be very vexed, and all the Valletorts would never forgive it; but it would be _such_ a triumph over Anne Hautton!" pondered Lady Marabout, and the last clause carried the day. Did you ever know private pique fail to carry the day over public charity? And Lady Marabout glanced with a glow of prospective triumph, which, though erring to her Order, was delicious to her individuality, at Goodwood waltzing with the little Montolieu a suspicious number of times, while Lady Egidia Hautton was condemned to his young brother, Seton Ascotte, and Lady Feodorowna danced positively with nobody better than their own county member, originally a scion of Goodwood's bankers! Could the force of humiliation further go? Lady Hautton sat smiling and chatting, but the tiara on her temples was a figurative thorn crown, and Othello's occupation was gone. When a lady's daughters are dancing with an unavailable _cadet_ of twenty, and a parvenu, only acceptable in the last extremities of despair, what good is it for her to watch the smiles and construe the attentions? "We shall see who triumphs now," thought Lady Marabout, with a glow of pleasure, for which her heart reproached her a moment afterwards. "It is very wrong," she thought; "if those poor girls don't marry, one ought to pity them; and as for her--going through five seasons, with a fresh burden of responsibility leaving the schoolroom, and added on your hands each year, _must_ sour the sweetest temper; it would do mine, I am sure. I dare say, if I had had daughters, I should have been ten times more worried even than I am."