‘Roger, here are Mr. and Mrs. Robert Elsmere. Mr. Elsmere, the Squire remembers you in petticoats, and I’m not sure that I don’t, too.’ Robert, smiling, looked beyond her to the advancing figure of the Squire, but if Mr. Wendover heard his sister’s remark he took no notice of it. He held out his hand stiffly to Robert, bowed to Catherine and Rose before extending to them the same formal greeting, and just recognized Langham as having met him at Oxford. Having done so he turned back to the knot of people with whom he had been engaged on their entrance. His manner had been reserve itself. The _hauteur_ of the grandee on his own ground was clearly marked in it, and Robert could not help fancying that toward himself there had even been something more. And not one of those phrases which, under the circumstances, would have been so easy and so gracious, as to Robert’s childish connection with the place, or as to the Squire’s remembrance of his father, even though Mrs. Darcy had given him a special opening of the kind. The young Rector instinctively drew himself together, like one who had received a blow, as he moved across to the other side of the fireplace to shake hands with the worthy family doctor, old Meyrick, who was already well known to him. Catherine, in some discomfort, for she too had felt their reception at the Squire’s hands to be a chilling one, sat down to talk to Mrs. Darcy, disagreeably conscious the while that Rose and Langham, left to themselves, were practically téte-à-téte, and that, moreover, a large stand of flowers formed a partial screen between her and them. She could see, however, the gleam of Rose’s upstretched neck, as Langham, who was leaning on the piano beside her, bent down to talk to her; and when she looked next she caught a smiling motion of Langham’s head and eyes toward the Romney portrait of Mr. Wendover’s grandmother, and was certain when he stopped afterward to say something to his companion, that he was commenting on a certain surface likeness there was between her and the young auburn-haired beauty of the picture. Hateful! And they would be sent down to dinner together to a certainty. The other guests were Lady Charlotte Wynnstay, a cousin of the Squire--a tall, imperious, loud-voiced woman, famous in London society for her relationships, her audacity, and the salon which in one way or another she managed to collect round her; her dark, thin, irritable-looking husband; two neighboring clerics--the first, by name Longstaffe, a somewhat inferior specimen of the cloth, whom Robert cordially disliked; and the other, Mr. Bickerton, a gentle Evangelical, one of those men who help to ease the harshness of a cross-grained world, and to reconcile the cleverer or more impatient folk in it to the worries of living.