For Charles was genuinely anxious to marry. He regarded with the greatest interest every eligible and ineligible young woman whom he came across. If Lady Mary had been aware of the very serious light in which he had considered Miss Louisa Smith, youngest daughter of a certain curate Smith, who in his youth had been originally extracted from a refreshment-room at Liverpool to become an ornament of the Church, that lady would have swooned with horror. But neither Miss Louisa Smith, with her bun and sandwich ancestry, nor the eighth Lord Breakwater's young and lovely sister, though both willing to undertake the situation, were either of them finally offered it. Charles remained free as air, and a dreadful stigma gradually attached to him as a heartless flirt and a perverter of young girls' minds from men of more solid worth. A man who pleases easily and is hard to please soon gets a bad name among--mothers. I don't think Lady Hope-Acton thought very kindly of him, as she sped up to Scotland in the night mail. Perhaps he was not so much to blame as she thought. Long ago, ten long years ago, in the reckless days of which Lady Mary had then made so much, and now made so little, poor Charles had been deeply in love with a good woman, a gentle, quiet girl, who after a time had married his brother Ralph. No one had suspected his attachment--Ralph and Evelyn least of all--but several years elapsed before he found time to visit them at Atherstone; and I think his fondness for Molly had its origin in his feeling for her mother. Even now it sometimes gave him a momentary pang to meet the adoration in Molly's eyes which, with their dark lashes, she had copied so exactly from Evelyn's. And now that he could come with ease on what had been forbidden ground, he had seen of late clearly, with the insight that comes of dispassionate consideration, that Evelyn, the only woman whom he had ever earnestly loved, whom he would have turned heaven and earth to have been able to marry, had not been in the least suited to him, and that to have married her would have entailed a far more bitter disappointment than the loss of her had been.