It was well for him that Miss Duberly could not guess how very slight was the effect that the discovery produced upon him. Well, too, for him that the girl to whom he was about to plight his troth knew, in common with all the world, so very little of the actual state of affairs at Gillingham Castle. They were a proud race, those Vavasours; their pride--Arthur’s, at least, taking the turn of resenting in silence his mother’s meanness, love of power--call it what you will--which led her to keep him, the heir-apparent, so “short,” that he was _driven_ (that was the young man’s way of putting it) to run in debt, and eventually to marry for money; results which were of course intensely odious and “disgusting.” The heir of Gillingham was descending in a very compromising manner from his pedestal in thus mixing his blue blood, and being brought down to the dull dignity of a “family-man,” by an enforced union with the Manchester man’s daughter. Arthur had, however, no resource but to submit. In silence (with the single exception of his almost unbounded confidence in his brother Horace) this self-indulgent, self-pitying young English gentleman bore his cross, inwardly chafing the while against the “shifts” to which he was reduced, and the self-denial that he was sometimes called upon to practise. It was not till Arthur was firmly established in the good graces of the merchant-prince--not till he was, in short, one of themselves--that he ventured to open the eyes of Mr. Duberly to the peculiarities of Lady Millicent’s character, and the unjust as well as unmotherly conduct of which he was himself a victim. As he had fully expected would be the case, this confession had no power to shake his hold on the good opinion of the unsuspecting Duberly. As a matter of course, Lady Millicent (whose pride and “stand-aloof” ways had already caused her to be no favourite with the plain-spoken, independent millionaire) came in for her full share of invective, and of a contemptuous ridicule of which, had she known of its existence, she would have strongly disapproved; but it is more than probable that “old Dub” liked his future son-in-law even better after this rather humiliating confession than he had done before. The love of patronising and protecting is inherent in most human breasts; and fortunate, indeed, is it that so it has been ordained to be, for where very frequently, were it otherwise, would the feeble and the friendless be? The love, then, of patronising being one of our nature’s idiosyncrasies, and Mr. Duberly not being _un_naturally constituted, that excellent man felt more than ever disposed to act a father’s part towards the “good-looking young fellow” of whom his only child, his dearly-beloved little Sophy, was so fond.