She felt the beating of his heart beneath her cheek. But she stood silent. His appeal, his unwonted agitation, revived in her all the anger and irritation that had begun to prey upon her thoughts. It was all very well, but why were they so pinched and uncomfortable? Why must everybody--Mrs. Allison, Lady Maxwell, a hundred others--have more wealth, more scope, more consideration than she? It was partly his fault. So she gradually drew herself away, pushing him softly with her small gloved hand. "I am sure I hate quarrelling," she said. "But there! Oh, George! don't let's talk of it any more! And look what you have done to my poor hair. You dear, naughty boy!" But though she called him "Dear," she frowned as she took off her gloves that she might mend what he had done. George thrust his hands into his pockets, walked to the window, and waited. As he descended the great stairs in her wake he wished Castle Luton and its guests at the deuce. What pleasure was to be got out of grimacing and posing at these country-house parties? And now, according to Letty, the Maxwells were here. A great _gene_ for everybody! CHAPTER XI "That lady sitting by Sir George? What! Lady Maxwell? No--the other side? Oh! that's Lady Leven. Don't you know her? She's tremendous fun!" And the dark-eyed, rosy-cheeked young man who was sitting beside Letty nodded and smiled across the table to Betty Leven, merely by way of reminding her of his existence. They had greeted before dinner--a greeting of comrades. Then he turned back, with sudden decorum, to this Lady Tressady, whom he had been commissioned to take in to dinner. "Quite pretty, but rather--well, ordinary!" he said to himself, with a critical coolness bred of much familiarity with the best things of Vanity Fair. He had been Ancoats's friend at Cambridge, and was now disporting himself in the Guards, but still more--as Letty of course assumed--in the heart of the English well-born world. She knew that he was Lord Naseby, and that some day he would be a marquis. A halo, therefore, shone about him. At the same time, she had a long experience of young men, and, if she flattered him, it was only indirectly, by a sort of teasing aggression that did not allow him to take his attention from her. "I declare you are better than any peerage!" she said to him presently, when he had given her a short biography, first of Lord Cathedine, who was sitting opposite, then of various other members of the company. "I should like to tie you to my fan when I go out to dinner." "Would you?" said the young man, drily. "Oh! you will soon know all you want to know." "How are poor little people from Yorkshire to find their way about in this big world? You are all so dreadfully absorbed in each other. In the first place, you all marry each other." "Do we?--though I don't quite understand who 'we' means. Well, one must marry somebody, I suppose, and cousins are less trouble than other people."