It was a curious thing in her state of mind, and with the feelings she had towards her husband's family, that one of the first things she did on establishing herself in her Ebury Street rooms, was to look for an old "Peerage" which had lain for several years she remembered on a certain shelf. Genteel lodgings in Ebury Street which did not possess somewhere an old "Peerage" would be out of the world indeed. She found it in the same corner as of old, where she had noted it so often and avoided it as if it had been a serpent; but now the first thing she did, as soon as her tray was brought her, and all necessary explanations given, and the door shut, was to take the book furtively from its place, almost as if she were afraid of what she should see. What a list there was of sons of Lord St. Serf! some she had never known, who died young: and Reginald in India, and Hal, who was so kind--what a good laugh he had, she remembered, not a joyless cackle like Mariamne's, a good natural laugh, and a kind light in his eyes: and he had been kind. She could remember ever so many things, nothings, things that made a little difference in the dull, dull cloudy sky of a neglected wife. Poor Hal! and he too was gone, and St. Serf dying, and---- Pippo the heir!--Pippo was perhaps, for any thing she knew, Lord Lomond now. To say that this did not startle Elinor, did not make her heart beat, did not open new complications and vistas in life, would be a thing impossible. Pippo Lord Lomond! Pippo, whom she had feared to expose to his father's influence, whom she had kept apart, who did not know anything about himself except that he was her son--had she kept and guarded the boy thus in the very obscurity of life, in the stillest and most protected circumstances, only to plunge him suddenly at last, without preparation, without warning, into the fiery furnace of temptation, into a region where he might pardonably (perhaps) put himself beyond her influence, beyond her guidance? Poor Elinor! and yet she was not wholly to be pitied either. For her heart was fired by the thought of her boy's elevation in spite of herself. It did not occur to her that such an elevation for him meant something also for her. That view of the case she did not take into consideration for a moment. Nay, she did not think of it. But that Pippo should be Lord Lomond went through her like an arrow--like an arrow that gave a wound, acute and sharp, yet no pain, if such a thing could be said. That he should discover his father had been the danger before her all his life, but if he must find out that he had a father that was a way in which it might not be all pain. I do not pretend that she was very clear in all these thoughts. Indeed, she was not clear at all. John Tatham, knowing but one side, had begun to think vaguely of Elinor what Elinor thought of her mother, that her mind was not quite as of old, not so bright nor so vivid, not so clear in coming to a conclusion; had he known everything