“Grand folks?” repeated her visitor with amusement. “Poor dear souls! how amused they be. They’d have been sold up if they hadn’t gone out; she hated going, said she’d rather live on a crust in England, but he jumped at the appointment; he’d a whole yelling pack of Jews on him; it’s quieted them of course; and he’s let Saxe-Durham for the term. You’d better tell your husband not to lend him any money, for he never pays, he can’t pay; he’s sure to get your daughter to ask.” “Lord’s sakes, my lady!” murmured Margaret Massarene: life became altogether inexplicable to her; if a gentleman who was a marquis, and governor of a province twice as big as France, they said, were not everything he ought to be, where could excellence and solvency be looked for? _O vertu où vas-tu te nicher?_ she would have said had she ever heard of the line. “But they are very--very--good people, are they not, ma’am?” she asked pathetically. “Oh, dear, yes; _she_ is much too ugly to be anything else, and he’s a very good fellow though he does make himself hated with his sharp tongue. He’s like that monarch, you know, who never did a wise thing and never said a silly one. He’s awfully clever, but he can’t keep his head above water. But why on earth did you let your daughter go for so long? They’ll get marrying her to one of their boys; they’ve no end of them.” She was not pleased that the young woman was staying with Lord Framlingham; he was a very clever and sarcastic person who might supply his guest with inconvenient and premature knowledge of English society in general and of Cocky and herself in particular. Mrs. Massarene smoothed down her beautiful gown with a nervous worried gesture. “Oh, ma’am, Katherine’s very discreet, and by her letters all she seems to be thinking about is the white temples and the black men.” “There are no black men in India, and you’d have done much better to keep her at home,” said her visitor sharply. “What is she like?” She intended this young woman for her brother Ronald, whatever she might be like. Maternal pride made Mrs. Massarene’s inexpressive and commonplace face for once eloquent and not ordinary: its troubled and dreary expression of chronic bewilderment lighted and changed; her wide mouth smiled, her colorless eyes grew almost bright. “If you’ll honor me, ma’am, by stepping this way,” she said with alacrity as she rose. “Horses step--people don’t,” said Lady Kenilworth, unkindly, as she accompanied the person whose instructress and tormentor she was, into a smaller room in which, set as it were upon an altar, a white marble bust stood on a plinth of jasper with a fence of hothouse flowers around it; hanging on the wall behind it was a portrait. Lady Kenilworth looked critically at both bust and portrait. She was surprised to find them what they were. “A classic face, and clever,” she said to the anxious mother. “Are they at all like? The bust’s Dalou’s, isn’t it? And the portrait----”