To afford decorous support to this fancy, her gayest clothes were thrown aside, to make way for a negligence of apparel which cost her two hours each morning to compose. Her dimpling smiles were now quite banished. She was ever sighing, and ever silent, and ever lolling and leaning about; reclining along sofas, or in some disconsolate attitude, grouping herself with one of the marble urns, and sitting "like Patience on a monument smiling at grief." Thaddeus preferred this pathetic whim to her former Sapphic follies; it afforded him quiet, and relieved him from much embarrassment. Every succeeding visit induced Miss Beaufort to observe him with a more lively interest. The nobleness yet humility with which he behaved towards herself and her aunt, and the manly serenity with which he suffered the insulting sarcasms of Miss Dundas, led her not merely to conceive but to entertain many doubts that his present situation was that of his birth. The lady visitors who dropped in on the sisters' studies were not backward in espousing the game of ridicule, as it played away a few minutes, to join in a laugh with the "witty Diana." These gracious beings thought their sex gave them privilege to offend; but it was not always that the gentlemen durst venture beyond a shrug of the shoulder, a drop of the lip, a wink of the eye, or a raising of the brows. Mary observed with contempt that they were prudent enough not to exercise even these specimens of a mean hostility except when its noble object had turned his back, and regarding him with increased admiration, she was indignant, and then disdainful, at the envy which actuated these men to treat with affected scorn him whom they secretly feared. [Illustration: MISS EUPHEMIA DUNDAS.] The occasional calls of Lady Tinemouth and Miss Egerton stimulated the cabal against Thaddeus. The sincere sentiment of equality with themselves which these two ladies evinced by their behavior to him, and the same conduct being adopted by Miss Dorothy and her beautiful niece, besides the evident partiality of Euphemia, altogether inflamed the spleen of Miss Dundas, and excited her _coterie_ to acts of the most extravagant rudeness. The little phalanx, at the head of which was the superb Diana, could offer no real reason for disliking a man who was not only their inferior, but who had never offended them even by implication. It was a sufficient apology to their easy consciences that "he gave himself such courtly airs as were quite ridiculous--that his presumption was astonishing. In short, they were all idle, and it was exceedingly amusing to lounge a morning with the rich Dundases and hoax Monsieur."