That afternoon was hurriedly convened a great meeting of the Dadd family to consider this announcement. Unmixed disapproval filled every bosom in the tribe. The engagement was held equivalent to the abdication of James Dadd from the headship of his race. In two ways the proposed marriage was disliked. It was thoroughly unsuitable to a Dadd; it was thoroughly unworthy of a Dadd. Lady Adela was at once too high and too low to be a fair match of James Dadd. Accident had given her a titular position superior to her lover’s, while her birth was in every way disastrously inferior to his own. Even St. Eldred’s had heard something of Lady Kirk-Hammerton, and it was impossible to imagine that her daughter could, by any stretch of courtesy, be called a lady in the true sense of the word. All the Dadd pride of birth rose up against the thought of connection with a girl without a grandfather--a girl, too, whom uninstructed sections of the world might dare to consider her husband’s social superior. It was felt that James Dadd had inflicted a crowning insult on his family in thus threatening to misally it. Mrs. John, Mrs. Reuben, Mrs. Joshua, coincided in the opinion firmly announced by the Misses Adelaide and Minna Dadd; the young Johns, Reubens, and Joshuas, dissented in nothing; only the peccant James’s sister, now a girl of promising beauty, held her own counsel, and decided to write congratulations to her brother and his destined bride. For in her, too, the blood of great-great-great-grandmother Messiter was at its fell work; her soul longed for change and variety and gaiety; and all these things she saw attainable through James’s marriage with the daughter of that notorious Lady Kirk-Hammerton. But she was too wise to make her heresy public; and the condemnation of James’s choice was passed without protest by the assembled council. An ultimatum was drafted by the Misses Adelaide and Minna Dadd, and would have been dispatched on the morrow, with the approval of all, had not the morrow brought news that destroyed every hope of reconciliation with the traitor. It was announced that, with royal permission, James Dadd, of Darnley-on-Downe, would in future be known as James Darnley. St. Eldred’s gasped at the wickedness of this public repudiation.