She left the Colonel, slightly shrugging his shoulders, and passed into the billiard-room with a quick step. Some ladies were already there looking at the players. Lord Montfort was chalking his cue. Lady Montfort walked straight up to him: her colour was heightened; her lip was quivering; she placed her hand on his shoulder with a wife-like boldness. It seemed as if she had come there to seek him from an impulse of affection. She asked with a hurried fluttering kindness of voice, if he had been successful, and called him by his Christian name. Lord Montfort’s countenance, before merely apathetic, now assumed an expression of extreme distaste. “Come to teach me to make a cannon, I suppose!” he said mutteringly, and turning from her, contemplated the balls and missed the cannon. “Rather in my way, Lady Montfort,” said he then, and, retiring to a corner, said no more. Lady Montfort’s countenance became still more flushed. She lingered a moment, returned to the drawing-room, and for the rest of the evening was unusually animated, gracious, fascinating. As she retired with her lady guests for the night she looked round, saw Colonel Morley, and held out her hand to him. “Your nephew comes here to-morrow,” said she, “my old play-fellow; impossible quite to forget old friends; good night.” CHAPTER IX. “Les extremes se touchent.” The next day the gentlemen were dispersed out of doors, a large shooting party. Those who did not shoot, walked forth to inspect the racing stud or the model farm. The ladies had taken their walk; some were in their own rooms, some in the reception-rooms, at work, or reading, or listening to the piano,--Honoria Carr Vipont again performing. Lady Montfort was absent; Lady Selina kindly supplied the hostess’s place. Lady Selina was embroidering, with great skill and taste, a pair of slippers for her eldest boy, who was just entered at Oxford, having left Eton with a reputation of being the neatest dresser, and not the worst cricketer, of that renowned educational institute. It is a mistake to suppose that fine ladies are not sometimes very fond mothers and affectionate wives. Lady Selina, beyond her family circle, was trivial, unsympathizing, cold-hearted, supercilious by temperament, never kind but through policy, artificial as clock work. But in her own home, to her husband, her children, Lady Selina was a very good sort of woman,--devotedly attached to Carr Vipont, exaggerating his talents, thinking him the first man in England, careful of his honour, zealous for his interest, soothing in his cares, tender in his ailments; to her girls prudent and watchful, to her boys indulgent and caressing; minutely attentive to the education of the first, according to her high-bred ideas of education,--and they really were “superior” girls, with much instruction and well-balanced minds,--less authoritative with the last, because boys being not under her immediate control, her sense