She bowed again, and after waiting for a moment to see if he had anything further to say to her, went quietly out of the room. It was in the library of a country house that this interview had taken place--the commonplace business room of a country gentleman of no very great pretensions. The walls were lined with bookcases in which there was a tolerable collection of books, but yet they did not tell for much in the place. They were furniture like the curtains, which were rather shabby, and the old Turkey carpet--most respectable furniture, yet a little neglected, wanting renewal. Mr. Mountford’s writing-table was laden with papers; he had plenty of business to transact, though not of a strictly intellectual kind. He was an old man, still handsome in his age, with picturesque snow-white hair in masses, clearly-cut, fine features, and keen eyes of that reddish hazel which betokens temper. Those eyes constantly burned under the somewhat projecting eyebrows. They threw a sort of angry lurid light on his face. The name of the house was Mount; it had been in the Mountford family for many generations; but it was not a beautiful and dignified house any more than he was a fine old English gentleman. Both the place and the man had traditionary rights to popular respect, but neither man nor place had enforced this claim by any individual beauty or excellence. There was no doubt as to the right of the Mountfords to be ranked among the gentry of the district, as good as the best, in so far that the family had been settled there for centuries; but they were of that curiously commonplace strain which is prevalent enough among the smaller gentry, without any splendour of wealth to dazzle the beholder, and which rouses in the mind of the spectator a wonder as to what it is that makes the squire superior to his neighbours. The Mountfords from father to son had got on through the world without any particular harm or good, uninteresting, ordinary people, respectable enough, yet not even very respectable. They were not rich, they were not able; they had nothing in themselves to distinguish them from the rest of the world; yet wherever the name of Mountford appeared, throughout all the southern counties at least, the claims of its possessor to gentility were founded on his relationship to the Mountfords of Mount. Most curious of all the triumphs of the aristocratical principle! Or rather perhaps it is the more human principle of continuance which is the foundation of this prejudice to which we are all more or less subject. A family which has lasted, which has had obstinacy enough to cling to its bit of soil, to its old house, must have something in it worth respect. This principle, however, tells in favour of the respectable shopkeeper quite as much as the squire, but it does not tell in the same way. The Mountfords felt themselves of an entirely different order from the shopkeeper--why, heaven knows! but their estimate was accepted by all the world.