“I don’t know about our envying you, my lord. I daresay we longed for some of your comforts, and envied the facility with which you smoothed down your existence, by packing yourselves off abroad whenever you were weary of your amusements at home. But I do not believe we ever wanted to change our characters for yours. We could not make you out. That is the truth about it.—I am sure I ought not to talk so free before the ladies.” “Go on, Temple,” softly said Gwen. “I want to know everything that has stood between you and us for so long.” “It is not that we felt no sympathy for you in your grief. Oh, dear! no. When a Duke loses the wife he loves, or a lady the child she adores, it goes straight to a man’s heart, whoever that man is. But it was in your funny kinds of worries that we were at sea. It seemed so childish to worry about trifles. I remember your lordship’s mother; I never saw anyone put out for nothing as she was. The lady’s maid once told me that her ladyship had not slept for two nights because one course at dinner had been spoiled. We all laughed very much about that in the servants’ hall. If such a thing had happened to any of us in our homes, we should have taken it jokily, and told our friends that we couldn’t help the roast mutton being underdone, or the pudding being burnt. Very likely we should have ended by telling them, that if they only came for what they could get out of us, they had better stay at home.” “Had we had the courage to live according to simpler rules, we should have been saved the innumerable pin-pricks which made our social existences so irksome, and for which we received no sympathy.” Gwendolen looked at Temple as if she had discovered the reason of all past dissensions. “We always thought,” resumed the valet, “that the upper classes worried themselves about nothing; and we naturally concluded that, in their way of seeing life and of feeling imaginary sorrows, lay the difference between them and us.” A fly was beating its tiny body against a window-pane. “I remember my father telling me how he once lay, badly wounded, in the Crimean War. On the ground, close to him, lay Captain Willesmere, severely injured in the groin. My father said he never should forget the moment when the young captain turned towards him, writhing under his pain, and offered him the last drops of brandy in his flask. The exertion had no doubt been too much for the young man, for he fell back in a swoon. That drop of spirits saved my father’s life, my lord, and he often told me that at that time he felt there was no social distance between himself and the Earl’s son.” “I do hope the gallant Captain soon recovered,” eagerly remarked Mrs Archibald. “Just what a gentleman would do; but I am afraid the lower class is not worth such sacrifice.”