Thus the one family was to the other what Mordecai was to Haman. Lady Westland kept her ears always open to hear anything to the disadvantage of the Markhams. Paul’s youthful vagaries, and even the little scrapes which Harry and Roland got into at school she seized upon with eagerness. She was as much interested in chronicling these misdeeds as if they had been so many items to her advantage; but, notwithstanding everything, the Markhams always came off the best. George Westland got into more scrapes at school than all of them put together; and now that he had come home, and had finished his education, what must he do, this heir to a peerage, this only son of so rich and important a house, but go sighing and gaping after Dolly Stainforth, who was no more than the parson’s daughter? His mother and sister were driven almost wild by the mere suspicion of this. And not only was it day by day more evidently true, but it even became apparent to them that George for once had reached a point from which he would neither be bullied nor frightened. He let them say whatever they pleased, but he took his own way. What Dolly thought of this has been already seen. Dolly, who was angry at her brother’s defection and sadly wounded by the failure of the Markhams, resented George Westland’s presence more than she did the absence of the others, and turned her back upon him, rejecting his services. She treated him with absolute contumely, impatient of his very look. Why is it that the wrong person will always present himself in such cases? Why, when a girl’s fancy is caught by one youth, will another attach himself to her side, and devote himself to her service, to have all the little carelessnesses of the other resented upon him? Dolly had not a word to say to young Westland. She would have liked to have pushed him aside out of her way; and Paul perhaps had not given one thought to Dolly since they danced together at the children’s balls at the Chase, while he was still a schoolboy. Thus the threads in the shuttle of life mix themselves up and get all woven the wrong way.