“Ah!----” said Spears, drawing a long breath. He could not be unaffected by what was an echo of his own eloquence. “But there’s a deal to say, too, for the other side.” CHAPTER III. The Markhams of the Chase were one of the most important families in the county, as has been already intimated. They owned three parts at least of the parish (for my Lord Westland was a new man, who had bought, not inherited, that property, and all that the Trevors had was their house and park and a few fields that did not count), and a great deal more besides. It was generally said that they had risen into importance as a family only at the time of the Commonwealth, but their pedigree extended far beyond that. In the former generation the family had not been fortunate. Sir William Markham himself had been born the third son, and in his youth he had been absent from England, and had “knocked about the world,” as people say, in a way which had no doubt enlarged his experiences and made him perhaps more fit for the responsibilities of public life in which he had been so fortunate. He had succeeded, on the death of his second brother, when he was over thirty, and it was not till ten years later that he married. It had occasioned some surprise in the neighbourhood when Isabel Fleetwood, who was a great beauty, and had made quite a sensation, it was said, in her first season, accepted the middle-aged and extremely sedate and serious little baronet. He was not handsome;--he had no sympathy with the gay life into which she had been plunged by her brother and aunt, who were her only guardians; and the world, always pleased to believe that interested motives are involved, and fond of prophesying badly of a marriage, concluded almost with one voice that it was the ambitious aunt and the extravagant brother who had made it up, and that the poor girl was sacrificed. But this was as great a mistake as the world ever made. Perhaps it would be wrong to assert that the marriage was a romantic one, and that the beautiful girl under twenty was passionately in love with her little statesman. Perhaps her modest, tranquil disposition, her dislike to the monotonous whirl of fashion, and her sense of the precarious tenure by which she held her position in her brother’s house, her only home (he married immediately after she did, as everybody knows, and did not conceal the fact that it was necessary to get rid of his sister before venturing upon a wife), had something to do with her decision. But she had never shown any signs of regretting it through all these years. Sir William was neither young nor handsome, but he was a man whose opinion was listened to wherever it was given, whose voice commanded the attention of the country, whose name was known over Europe. And this in some cases affects a young imagination as much as the finest moustache in the world, or the most distinguished stature. She was not clever, but she was a woman of that