“Bother the man!” muttered the marchioness, impatiently, as she rose to receive him. “He is a quarter of an hour too soon. This is so good of you!” she exclaimed, in an altered voice, as the form of the visitor appeared in the doorway. Mr. Hammond entered. About his personal appearance there was nothing remarkable. It is bad form to look remarkable, and much of John Hammond’s life had been devoted to avoiding everything in the way of bad form. His attire was in every respect a perfect replica of that of any other hundred men to be met between Waterloo Place and Hyde Park Corner of an afternoon in the London season. He was clean-shaven, and his clear-cut features were those of an able man, not yet entered upon middle age, who has been accustomed to have the world at his feet, and whose only anxieties have been caused to him by his own ambition. John Hammond was a favorable representative of the class which is gradually replacing the last remains of our feudal aristocracy. The Hammond fortune had been created by his father, so that he was not a self-made man. In the sense in which the word is used to-day, he was undoubtedly a gentleman. He had been educated at the best public school--that is to say, the most expensive--in England, and in the most fashionable college of the most fashionable university. He had been in the best set, both at school and at college, an advantage which his smartness as a wicket-keeper and his inherited millions perhaps contributed about equally to procure. He had taken a good degree; he now took a cold bath every morning, rode to hounds, and sat in the House of Commons as a Conservative. But John Hammond lacked one thing, which neither money nor merit could procure. He had not been born and reared in an ancestral mansion, built in the days of the Tudors or the Stuarts, on the site of a Norman keep. He had not wandered as a child through dusty galleries from whose oak-panelled walls looked down the portraits of dead generations of his name. He had not heard from his nurse the story of the loyal ancestor who fought for King Charles, and of the wicked ancestor who killed his rival in a duel, and of the beautiful ancestress in whose praise poems had been written by Waller or by Davenant. He had not roamed as a boy through hereditary woodlands, and bullied the keepers’ sons whose forefathers had served his from time immemorial. He had not grown up with the feeling in his blood that all this was part of him, and he was part and lord of it. He was only lord of a brewery, in which his father had once brewed with his own hands.