evident to the followers in his line than any ground for imputations less flattering; with which it seemed further unmistakeable that a posterity in such good humour with itself and its traditions might have even enough of that grace to spare for cases of the minor felicity. How at any rate had it come about that the minor felicity, of all things in the world, could be a distinguishable mark of the English Pendrels, the legend of any awkward accident or any foregone advantage in whose annals would so scantly have emerged as matter for free reference? This was a question that might with the extraordinary swell of our young man's present vision find itself as answerable as the next before or the next after. Every question became answerable, in its turn, the moment it was touched; so that when his companion, as she had so bravely become, mentioned the repair of the family breach he jumped at the occasion for a full illustration of the subject. "You see how little difference your mother's marriage made to us, with the extinction of our name here involved in it; since if Pendrels had at last failed us, for the pleasure over there of thinking of them, we could make Midmores answer almost as well at the worst--take _them_ up even with a resignation which, now that I know you, cousin," Ralph went on, "seems to put our acquaintance in a light that couldn't possibly be bettered." "Certainly the Midmores are as good as anybody," the young lady bearing their name flared out in the charmingest way to reply; "for we're not forgetting, are we? that it was a Pendrel after all, one of yours, though of mamma's own recognised blood too, who came out as if on purpose to make the trouble among us; the trouble we doubtless needn't go into again now, even if it seems to have been thought as ill as possible of at the time." "No, we needn't go into that of course," Ralph smiled--smiled verily through his exhilarated sense that whereas the best of reasons for their not doing so would have dwelt a few moments before in his imperfect grasp of that affair, he now enjoyed the superior view of it as well before him and only a bit embarrassing to handle. "You didn't like us then, and we must have been brought up not greatly to like you--all the more even, no doubt, if we were in the wrong," he cleverly put it; "so that things got worse, and we thought still more evil, on both sides, than there _was_ to think; which perhaps didn't matter, nevertheless," he added, "when once all commerce was quite broken off. Nothing can have passed between us, I make out, for at least twenty years; during which"--for that also came to him--"we lost every remnant of the credit originally enjoyed with you all by the stiffness of our stand on your side during the dreadful War."