“Do you want to make a laughing-stock of your sister?” the young man said, confounding them all; and the obnoxious decorations were taken off with a silent speed that was wonderful. It was wonderful, as being inspired by a mysterious sense of having made a mistake. They had no idea what the mistake was; and their pride would not permit them to ask enlightenment; but they felt it the more from its mysterious and unknown character. When Nancy was ready, and wrapped in the warm white _sortie du bal_ which they had bought in Paris, the effect of this error was sufficiently obliterated; and the young husband’s heart swelled with a little pride when he presented her to the man who had sent him out of his house because of Nancy. That practical protestation had not done much more good than all the other efforts which had been made to sever Arthur from his love; and here she was now, fair and blooming, an unquestionable fact, which they were all compelled to recognize. But as he left her in charge of Mrs. Eagles, and dropped off behind, what anxiety was in Arthur’s thoughts! It was her first essay in society; would she take the trouble to please? He stood furtively watching her as he talked to the Curate, whose wife was also on her trial, but caused him no such tremour. The Curate’s wife was a small young lady of ordinary breeding and appearance, not to be compared with Nancy in any possible respect. But she had been born a clergyman’s, not a tax-collector’s daughter. She knew the outside of social ways, and how not to commit herself, which was exactly what Nancy did not know. And it must be allowed that, when Arthur saw that only this Curate and his wife had been invited to meet them, he was wroth with a savage sort of anger and scornful humiliation. He gave no sign of his feelings; but he had been accustomed to be somebody wherever he went, and the sense that he had now dropped into a doubtful position, in which only the Curate could be supposed likely to countenance him, gave him a sense of what had befallen him more sharp and sudden than anything else that had happened, even than the familiarities of the Bates family. To say that Nancy was angry too, would be little. Her whole soul rose up in a blaze of wrath. She had expected to see everything that was fine and famous on the Green, and to receive, in a way, the homage of the assembled aristocracy. Nobody with a title lived at Underhayes, and Nancy considered that she herself had all but a title, and was to be admired in proportion; yet there was no one here but the little Curate’s wife. She talked largely to Mr. Eagles during dinner, giving him her opinion of Society in England. “Of course being brought up in a place like this, I have seen but little; and here not much to speak of,” she said, with a frankness that prepossessed her host--himself so trenchant and decided at all times.