I spent the remainder of the winter thinking out the completion of my design. Of course, the Earl would have to go first. It would leave me several years to deal with his heir, and in the vicissitudes of a boy’s life there must be innumerable occasions when death may accidentally step in and claim him. There was at this time a talk of sending Lord Gascoyne to a large dependency as Governor. The rumour threw me into a state of the greatest anxiety. If he betook himself and his family to the other end of the world he might have half a dozen children round him before I could interfere. Luckily the project fell through for the time being, but his abilities and personal dignity marked him out as a man to whom the offer was certain to be made again. Lionel Holland had a great ambition to know Lord and Lady Gascoyne. Lord Gascoyne, at all events, was born a freeman of that inner ring which, for all his fine acquaintances, had so far held Lionel at bay. Some of them had been civil to Sibella, for she, like Grahame, had a natural distinction which people were impelled to admit. When, however, it became a question of accepting Lionel also—and he was by no means the person to stand aloof—they drew off. His vanity refused to admit that he had been snubbed, but inwardly he was conscious that there was something wrong. He had therefore fixed on the Gascoynes as people who would be able to secure him an introduction to the highest circle of the social heaven. It was in vain that I assured him quite frankly that I was not on terms of intimacy with them or any of their friends, that, so far, I was not married to Miss Gascoyne, and that my Jewish blood made me more or less of an outsider in the family. He looked upon this as affectation. “Why, you might be Lord Gascoyne! You’re as good as any of them.” “I shall be when I am Lord Gascoyne, but so far I am only plain Israel Rank. No, I won’t call myself plain, for that would indeed be affectation.” “You’ve been to their house.” “Once or twice.” “You’ve dined there.” “Once only.” “People of that kind don’t ask a man to dinner unless they look upon him as one of themselves.” “Except for political motives,” I murmured. He was too dense to see the point, and persisted. “An acquaintance like that wants nursing,” he said patronisingly, much as an old hand might have done to a young man just starting in business. As a matter of fact, he was exactly suggesting what I was doing, but my methods were superior to his, and I should never have thought of describing them with such a lack of taste. His inability to see this was the secret of his non-success with the particular class he was anxious to cultivate. I heard from Miss Gascoyne constantly, and my letters in reply to her high-souled, dignified, yet tender epistles were masterpieces in diplomacy—an unkind critic might have said in hypocrisy.