This was the position of affairs when Duke, John Parke’s eldest son, came of age. Duke’s majority was celebrated as if indeed it was he who was the heir. The family had by this time been so long established in the chief house of the race that they were scarcely conscious that it was not theirs by full right of possession. Letty, the eldest girl, was nineteen; she was not quite three years older than Mar, and his champion and supporter in the family. There were two boys younger than she, and a little girl who brought up the rear--all of whom were stronger, noisier, more assuredly at home, masters and mistresses of the position, than the quiet, slim, pale boy, too long, too slight, too grave for his years, who had the habit of being pushed into the background, and never asserted himself, or took any distinctive place in the family party. The younger ones, indeed, were all contemptuous of Mar. His delicacy, of which so much was made, his perpetual staying at home, his supposed incapacity for their sports, and indifference to their pleasures, had been part of their code all their life. There were so many things that Mar could not do. “Oh, he can’t come. He’ll catch cold,” Reginald, who was sixteen, said scornfully when there was any question of Mar sharing their pleasures. The members of the family who stood by Mar were the two eldest, and little Mary, the youngest girl, whom her mother called Tiny, in order not to use poor Lady Frogmore’s name, which John had insisted upon giving her--who made a slave of the quiet boy and found him very serviceable. The girls made Mar’s life a little brighter than it would otherwise have been, and Duke when he was at home, which was not very often, was always good to his old playfellow, who looked up to him as a youth of sixteen does to one of twenty-one, with admiration and devotion. And thus the time drew on to Duke’s majority. The preparations for it caused a little scandal in the neighborhood. The good people about protested to each other that it was for all the world as if John Parke’s son was the heir, but they accepted with alacrity all the same the invitations which Letitia sent forth in so liberal a way. There was to be a dinner of the farmers, who had known Master Duke all his life. There was to be a great ball to which all the county was invited, and there was a fête in the Park for the village folk and all the poor neighbors, and also for the “smart” people whose revels were of a less noisy kind. It is so much the fashion nowadays to put the poor neighbors in the foreground that this fête was Letitia’s _chef d’œuvre_. The programme altogether was one by which she felt she was to distinguish herself in the county, and which would mark Duke’s birthday as nothing else could do. Mrs. Parke, indeed, spoke of her son exactly as if he were the heir. She spoke of her humble guests as having seen him grow up, as taking such an interest in him. All the connections of the family