Then first the thought struck her, that it must be his grandfather's doing that he was in the house! and there he was, at their very door, eager to bear testimony to the bookbinder as his grandson and heir to Mortgrange! Alas, the thing must be a fact, a horrible fact! All was over!--But she would do battle for her rights! She would not allow that the child was found! The thing was a conspiracy to supplant the true heir! How ruinous were the low tastes of gentlemen! If sir Wilton had but kept to his own rank, and made a suitable match, nothing of all this misery would have befallen them! If her predecessor had been a lady, her son would have been a gentleman, and there would have been nothing to complain of! To lady Ann, her feeling had the force of a conviction, that the son of Robina Armour could not, in the nature of things divinely ordained, have the same rights as her son. Lady Ann's God was the head of the English aristocracy. There was nothing selfish that lady Ann was not capable of wishing; there was nothing selfish she might not by degrees become capable of doing. She could not at that moment commit murder; neither could lady Macbeth have done so when she was a girl. The absurd falsity of her notions as to her rights, came from lack of love to her neighbour, and consequent insensibility to his claims. At the same time she had not keen, she had only absorbing feelings of her rights; there was nothing _keen_ in lady Ann; neither sense nor desire, neither hope nor fear, neither joy nor sorrow, neither love nor hate. Beyond her own order, beyond indeed her own circle in that order, the universe hardly existed. An age-long process of degeneration had been going on in her race, and she was the result: she was well born and well bred for feeling nothing. There is something fearful in the thought that through the generations the body may go on perfecting, while the heart goes on degenerating; that, while the animal beauty is growing complete in the magic of proportion, the indescribable marvel that can even give charm to ugliness, is as steadily vanishing. Such a woman, like Branca d'Oria in the Inferno, is already damned, and only seems to live. Lady Ann was indeed born capable of less than most; but had she attempted to do the little she could, one would not have been where she was; she would have beep toiling up the hill of truth, with a success to be measured, like the widow's mite, by what she had not. All her thoughts were now occupied with the _rights_ of her son, and through him of the family. Sir Wilton had been for some time ailing, and when he went, they would be at the mercy of any other heir than Arthur, just as miserably whether he were the true heir or an impostor; the one was as bad as the other from her point of view! For the right, lady Ann cared nothing, except to have it or to avoid it. The law of the land was to be respected no doubt, but your own family--most of all when land was concerned--was worthier still!