After the return of the Lestranges and the Wylders to their country-homes, lady Ann, having prevailed, on Mrs. Wylder to pay her a visit, initiated an attempt to gain her connivance in her project for the alliance of the houses. For this purpose she opened upon her with the same artillery she had employed against her husband. Mrs. Wylder sat for some time quietly listening, but looking so like her daughter, that lady Ann saw the mother's and not the father's was the alliance to seek. Thereupon she plucked the tompion out of the best gun in her battery, as she thought, and began to hint a fear that Miss Wylder had taken a fancy to a person unworthy of her. “Girls who have not been much in society,” she said, “are not unfrequently the sport of strange infatuations! I have myself known an earl's daughter marry a baker! I do not, of course, imagine _your_ daughter guilty of the slightest impropriety,--” Scarcely had the word left her lips, when a fury stood before her--towered above her, eyes flashing and mouth set, as if on the point of tearing her to pieces. “Say the word and my Bab in the same breath again, and I'll throttle you, you vile woman!” cried Mrs. Wylder, and hung there like a thunder-cloud, lightening continuously. Lady Ann was not of a breed familiar with fear, but, for the first time in her life, except in the presence of her mother, a far more formidable person than herself, she did feel afraid--of what, she would have found it hard to say, for to acknowledge the possibility of personal violence would be almost as undignified as to threaten it! “I did not mean to offend you,” she said, growing a little paler, but at the same time more rigid. “What sort of mother do you take me for? Offended, indeed! Would you be all honey, I should like to know, if I had the assurance, to say such a thing of one of your girls?” “I spoke as to a mother who knew what girls are like!” “You don't know what my girl Bab is like!” cried Mrs. Wylder, with something that much resembled an imprecation: the word she used would shock thousands of mothers not comparable to her in motherhood. If propriety were righteousness, the kingdom of heaven would be already populous. Lady Ann was offended, and seriously: was alliance with such a woman permissible or sufferable? But she was silent. For once in her life she did not know the proper thing to say. Was the woman mad, or only a savage? Mrs. Wylder's eloquence required opposition. She turned away, and with a backward glance of blazing wrath, left the room and the house. “Home like the devil!” she said to the footman as he closed the door of the carriage--and she disappeared in a whirlwind.