The dreadful debaucheries of Cocky had impoverished his father woefully, and the entail had been eaten into as the eastern coast of England is being gnawed away by the sea. But the long minority would do much to restore the fallen fortunes of the great dukedom, and a strict economy was inaugurated. Her own jointure was of course paid regularly to her; but it seemed to her brother that it must be utterly insufficient to afford her means to live as she chose to live. A great disquietude and alarm always weighed on him about her, but she had chosen to quarrel with him. He could not sue for reconciliation when he was in the right. Hurstmanceaux was as tender-hearted as he was proud, and if she had made any sign of contrition or affection he would have forgiven all her insolence and have gone to her at once. But she had shut the door in his face; she had insulted him by the lips of her little daughter. He could not make any advances to her. For her own part she was relieved not to see him. Something might have transpired to excite his suspicions; he might have noticed the altered tone of William Massarene, or he might have interrogated her as to her ways and means, and found her replies unsatisfactory. He was much better away, and she made no sign to him. Her movements he heard of from his other sisters, and from the columns of the _Morning Post_. In the late autumn he saw that she was staying at Vale Royal; the Christmas recess she passed with Carrie Wisbeach; the new year saw her in a suite of rooms at the Residential Hotel facing Hyde Park. “How does she get the ready money?” he said to Lady Wisbeach, who had come from her journey round the globe as though she had only been down to Greenwich. “Oh, a woman alone, you know, with only a maid,” said that loyal lady carelessly, “a woman alone needn’t spend more than a sparrow. It isn’t as if she had the children. And then in mourning, and hardly going out except to quiet little things----” Hurstmanceaux did not find the explanation very satisfactory. “Do you think she regrets that man?” he said, after a pause. “What man?” “Lord Brancepeth.” “Oh, no,” said Carrie Wisbeach. “My dear Ronnie, where _do_ you live? Who regrets things when they have been on all that while?” He was silent; he felt that his sisters were far beyond him in the knowledge of life. “You might as well talk of regretting a worn-out shoe,” said Lady Wisbeach, with some impatience. “Surely you admit she should have married him?”