Lord Carthew laughed with her, but was a good deal touched at the same time. The picture of the lonely child, snubbed and repressed and deprived of all healthy young companionship, secretly planning revolutionary dramas with her dolls, struck him as being equally original and pathetic. Stella Cranstoun’s utter dissimilarity from the young ladies of his acquaintance was a source of great delight to him. Her perfectly clear and distinct enunciation and sweet-toned voice came as a blessed relief after the fashionable high key and slipshod speech in vogue in London at that time, which had been aptly aped by the pretty Braithwaite girls. Stella’s somewhat old-fashioned method of speech, which was that of a well-educated girl who had heard little but read much, and her entire ignorance of slang and absence of self-consciousness, were equally charming to him, The one desire of fashionable women, as he knew well, is to speak, move, dress, and behave in precisely the same style as the known leaders of society. But Stella had no idea that it behooved her to mould herself on some one else’s model; she was consequently altogether modest, natural, and unaffected, and unlike any woman he had ever met before. As to her strong natural sympathy with the poorer classes, the result, as he imagined, of the repressive system on which she had been reared, he himself affected and believed that he possessed the same quality. Theoretically, he looked upon a costermonger as a man and a brother, and failed to see the use of the House of Lords; practically, he regarded the lower orders as interesting curiosities, and strongly resented the admission of brewers into the peerage. Stella’s republican sympathies would impel her, no doubt, in the direction of soup-kitchens and schools when she became Lady Carthew, and soup-kitchens and schools were very desirable outlets for the generous instincts of a future countess. For under her gentle, graceful manner, it was impossible for any one unacquainted with her earliest history to detect an absolute hatred of aristocratic proclivities; in the granddaughter of a Duke her unconventional sentiments were piquant and interesting, and in no way suggestive of the fierce blood dormant in the veins of the daughter of a gypsy.