It was not to be expected that this new fact should bring about any sudden alteration in the feeling of St. Eldred’s towards the Dadds. Only a mild flutter agitated for a while the red-brick houses. Then it was felt that the acquisition of wealth by the Dadds was very right and proper. Wealth was only vulgar when in new and plebeian hands. A Dadd could be trusted to avoid giving offence, a Dadd would never be ostentatious, nor presume to change his mode of life. So, undeterred by any disapproval from their peers, the ruling Dadds proceeded quietly to develop their new possibilities. What those possibilities were no one had the audacity or the grandeur of mind to compute. Unsuspected, unrealized, volumes of money rolled ceaselessly in to the account of the mine-owners, while they, in their innocence, continued unperturbed in the old simple ways, never caring to dream that their new wealth could do more for them than add, at most, a parlourmaid. It was some years before even this grand addition was made to their scale of living, and then it was only when the sudden death of James Dadd the Eighth had left the family sceptre in the hands of a queen-regent. The widow ruled for her son (now, at a tender age, raised to the rank of James Dadd the Ninth), and hardly had she grasped the reins of power than she began to show signs of wishing to use the abundant resources which had now been accumulating for fifteen years or more. Her ambitions were not approved, and the extra parlourmaid was only condoned as an indulgence for the sorrows of widowhood. But from that moment a little rift began to widen between the reigning Dadds and Darnley-on-Downe. The money began insensibly to come between the rulers and the ruled. It was inevitable that it should. An income--even an unspent income--of fifteen thousand a year cannot long live on terms of perfect friendly equality with incomes of several hundred or so. The richer, sooner or later, condescends; the poorer, sooner or later, grudges. Thus it was in Darnley-on-Downe. Even the suspicion that Mrs. Dadd had ‘notions’--that she would have liked a landau, and had conceived thoughts of sending her sons to Eton--caused a certain vigilant enmity to exasperate the keenness with which her every action was watched and weighed by her council of relatives. The slightest sign of ambition was soon marked as a treason to the clan. All the Dadd connections, all the Dadd collaterals, all the dowagers and younger branches of the Dadds made common cause with St. Eldred’s, and joined in the general suspicion with which the conduct of Mrs. Dadd was viewed. The widow found herself unable to carry out the smallest extravagance. Very innocent and trifling were the few indulgences that she had hoped for, but even these were put beyond her reach by the decree of her relatives, by that incorruptible synod over which even a Dadd queen-regent had no more power than a doge of Venice over his Council of Ten.