In point of fact it was Lady Adela, gentle and winning, whose vitality had stirred to a great effort, under great pressure, and had risen to urge upon her lover this change of name. She pointed out that to ask a girl to become Lady Adela Dadd was to exact a sacrifice as far beyond mortal power to grant as beyond mortal justice to demand. James Dadd, recognising that he could never hope to be reincluded in the clan whose nominal sovereign he still was, found himself inclined to consider Lady Adela’s plea in a favourable spirit. Together they decided to adopt the more euphonious name of Darnley, and James Dadd hastened to make his decision public, that thus he might at once be finally cut off from any remonstrances or embassies of his family. He judged the temper of St. Eldred’s rightly. His announcement was taken as an irremediable declaration of war. His name was never mentioned again in Darnley-on-Downe, except as that of one deservedly dead and unregretted. The sceptre passed into the capable hands of Mr. and Mrs. Reuben Dadd, and by silent consent it was agreed that no infant henceforth should bear the dishonoured names of James or Robert. Only James Dadd’s young sister remained hopefully loyal to his memory, and when, a year later, the redoubled severity of the Misses Adelaide and Minna Dadd alone betrayed their secret knowledge that a son had been born to Mr. and Lady Adela Darnley, the one acknowledgment of the event that reached the outlaw from Darnley-on-Downe was a surreptitiously-posted letter of his sister’s. If anything could have aggravated the wrath of the Misses Adelaide and Minna Dadd it would have been the knowledge that the infant, that their own great nephew, had been christened, not James, but Kingston. Kingston Darnley, indeed! There was a name for a child! You cannot make a silk purse out of a sow’s ear, said the Misses Adelaide and Minna Dadd; and they were universally felt to have expressed the situation in all its bearings. And thus, from years of corrupting wealth and secret disloyalty, was generated the culminating disgrace of the Dadds, in Kingston Darnley. Kingston Darnley!