“Not if I can help it,” she said, half crying again, holding out her hand; and in sight of the biggest of the powdered footmen, and of the porter, and of one of the under-gardeners, all looking on in consternation, he kissed it, absolutely indifferent to what any one might say. To be sure it was only a little glove he kissed, warm out of her muff. CHAPTER XXII. The Opposite Camp. The Thornleigh family, or at least the feminine portion of it, was, as has been indicated to the reader, in town--though it was still very early in the year--for the purpose of looking after little Mary’s trousseau, as her wedding was to take place at Easter. Lady Augusta’s family numbered eight altogether--five girls and three boys; and if I could tell you half the trouble she had gone through with them, you would no longer wonder at the wrinkles on her forehead. Her girls had been as troublesome as her boys, which seldom happens, and that was saying a great deal. Harry, the eldest son, was a prodigal, constantly in debt and in trouble; John, the second, who, it was hoped, would have distinguished himself by his brains, had been plucked for his degree; and the regiment of which Reginald, the youngest son, was an ornament, had been sent off to India, contrary to all prognostications. As for the daughters, though the youngest was nineteen, only one was married--a terrible thought for an anxious mother, as anxious to do her duty by her children as Lady Augusta was--and that one! The eldest was Ada, who, when her lover, only a poor clergyman at the best, died of typhus fever, caught in his work, never would look at another man, but retired meekly into old maidenhood. The second, Helena, was the clever one of the family. She had more brains than all the rest put together, everybody said, and so indeed she herself thought--more than she knew what to do with. If that head could only have been put on her brother John’s shoulders, what a blessing to everyone concerned! for, alas! all the good her brains did her, was to betray her into a marriage with a very clever and very learned professor, painfully superior to everybody else, but altogether out of “her own class.” The third was Gussy, who had been always Lady Augusta’s most dearly beloved, and who, three years ago, had been all but betrothed to the best match in the county--young Edgar Arden; but when Edgar was ruined, and disappeared, as it were, off the face of the earth, Gussy, instead of abandoning him as a sensible girl should have done, clung with the obstinacy which distinguished the Thornleighs, to the very recollection of him--which, as he was still living and marriageable, though no match at all, was a fanaticism much less manageable than Ada’s. For Ada, if she insisted upon considering herself a widow, was at all events quite submissive in other matters, and content to be her mother’s right hand at home; but Gussy, who had by no means given up her personal