She was as cold as himself, and Mr. Massarene was divided between a feeling of great embarrassment and a desire to propitiate a person whom he saw was not easy to win over by any means. In his difficulty he said the worst thing he could have said: “I hope, Lord Hurstmanceaux,” he stammered, pronouncing correctly the name as society pronounced it, Hurceaux--“I venture to hope we shall be friends; your sister, Lady Kenilworth, wishes it so much.” “My sister’s friends are seldom mine,” replied Ronald with extreme incivility; then, fearing he might be thought to imply--as he did--something to her prejudice, added in icy accents, “I mean that her set is not mine.” “Indeed! Is that so, sir?” said Mr. Massarene, surprised; for the mystery of “Sets” was still unmastered by him, he only understood Classes. “The Prince is coming to stay with me at Vale Royal,” he added; “might I hope that you too----?” “I am not in the Prince’s set,” said Hurstmanceaux curtly, and seeming to the eyes of Mr. Massarene to become ten feet in height. The reply was altogether beyond him. “Not in the Prince’s set,” he thought to himself; “what on earth can the fellow mean?” “Don’t you go to Court, my lord?” he said aloud in his bewilderment. Ronald’s severity relaxed despite himself; he laughed outright. Katherine stood by, indignant, ashamed, frozen by humiliation and anger into a statue. At last, in desperation, she turned to her father: “Lord Hurstmanceaux would hardly care to come to us at his cousin’s place. He must have shot there many seasons. I think Mrs. Raby is looking for you. Someone has arrived.” Mr. Massarene hurried toward his hostess and her tea-table; with a chilly inclination of the head his daughter followed him, and left Hurstmanceaux to his own reflections. The foremost of these was, that it was a pity so thoroughbred-looking a woman has such an unutterable brute for a sire. The second was that he had been guilty himself of discourtesy and incivility toward a lady to whom he already owed some apology. But he was extremely angry at the snare which had been spread for him in this innocent old house of Bedlowes. He stayed three days in the same house with them, because he had no decent pretext to hasten his departure, but he avoided all chance of increased acquaintance as he would have avoided the bubonic plague in his travels through Thibet. “He’s only a second-class earl and gives himself such airs as that!” said Mr. Massarene, in great displeasure, to his daughter when he could speak to her unheard. “What do you mean by a second-class earl? It is an expression unknown in ‘Burke,’” asked his daughter in her coldest accents. Mr. Massarene explained that he meant an earl who had very little money, whose chief estates were in Ireland, and who was not a knight of any Order or anything of that decorative kind. “And he said that he doesn’t even go to Court,” he ended as a climax.