But if the daughter emphasized the mother’s mature and vehement charms, so did the mother’s overwhelming presence show up the pale grace of the daughter. Lady Adela Vayne-Kingston was pretty, shrinking, mild, domestic--the very type that, in happier circumstances, would have been most dear to St. Eldred’s. She hated her mother’s loud voice and louder manners; her one hope was to marry someone obscure and gentle, who would remove her from the burning atmosphere of Lady Kirk-Hammerton, in whose train, since her girlhood, she had been dragged hither and thither, never protesting, but always reluctant. James Dadd, for his part, found in Lady Adela a reminiscence of his old home-life. She seemed to him the ghost of peaceful St. Eldred’s, with an added touch of worldly experience and travelled charm. Her character, far from repeating her mother’s, harked back to some obscure ancestress, probably in domestic service, and was so meek and placid as to be the very incarnation of all that James Dadd had been brought up to love and respect. On the other hand, this same gentleness of temperament, which St. Eldred’s considered the hall-mark of good breeding, was believed by Lady Kirk-Hammerton to be especially distasteful to those high circles after which she hankered; and she had long, therefore, been eagerly seeking a chance to be rid of the daughter whom her best efforts had failed to render brazen and clamorous. Her delight, accordingly, surpassed all bounds, when at the end of a week’s acquaintance, James Dadd proposed to Lady Adela, and was thankfully accepted. Though the Misses Adelaide and Minna Dadd had ceased to subscribe to ‘the Paper,’ they yet had their recognised channels for the reception of news. For the butcher conveyed the events of the world to their cook, and she, in turn, laid edited selections before her mistresses. In this way was brought to their notice the approaching marriage between ‘James Dadd, Esq., of Darnley-on-Downe, and the Lady Adela Vayne-Kingston, daughter of the late Earl of Kirk-Hammerton.’