“Nor you either, mother. I am sure that you do not think you have. Say that you do not regret it. Dearest mother, say so for my sake. Do you not know in your heart of hearts that she was not suited to be happy as my wife,—or to make me happy?” “Perhaps not,” said Lady Lufton, sighing. And then she kissed her son, and declared to herself that no girl in England could be good enough for him. CHAPTER XXXI. SALMON FISHING IN NORWAY. Lord Dumbello’s engagement with Griselda Grantly was the talk of the town for the next ten days. It formed, at least, one of two subjects which monopolized attention, the other being that dreadful rumour, first put in motion by Tom Towers at Miss Dunstable’s party, as to a threatened dissolution of Parliament. “Perhaps, after all, it will be the best thing for us,” said Mr. Green Walker, who felt himself to be tolerably safe at Crewe Junction. “I regard it as a most wicked attempt,” said Harold Smith, who was not equally secure in his own borough, and to whom the expense of an election was disagreeable. “It is done in order that they may get time to tide over the autumn. They won’t gain ten votes by a dissolution, and less than forty would hardly give them a majority. But they have no sense of public duty—none whatever. Indeed, I don’t know who has.” “No, by Jove; that’s just it. That’s what my aunt Lady Hartletop says; there is no sense of duty left in the world. By-the-by, what an uncommon fool Dumbello is making himself!” And then the conversation went off to that other topic. Lord Lufton’s joke against himself about the willow branches was all very well, and nobody dreamed that his heart was sore in that matter. The world was laughing at Lord Dumbello for what it chose to call a foolish match, and Lord Lufton’s friends talked to him about it as though they had never suspected that he could have made an ass of himself in the same direction; but, nevertheless, he was not altogether contented. He by no means wished to marry Griselda; he had declared to himself a dozen times since he had first suspected his mother’s manœuvres, that no consideration on earth should induce him to do so; he had pronounced her to be cold, insipid, and unattractive in spite of her beauty; and yet he felt almost angry that Lord Dumbello should have been successful. And this, too, was the more inexcusable, seeing that he had never forgotten Lucy Robarts, had never ceased to love her, and that, in holding those various conversations within his own bosom, he was as loud in Lucy’s favour as he was in dispraise of Griselda. “Your hero, then,” I hear some well-balanced critic say, “is not worth very much.”