sourness of disappointment in her. The very fact that she was Lady Stanton carried with it a certain aggravation, a parrot-like adhesion to the letter and change of the spirit, such as had been in the promises made to Macbeth. Mary might have thought herself the victim of a perverse fate, keeping the word of promise to the ear and breaking it to the heart, had she been perversely disposed--but instead of that, all her thoughts at the present moment were occupied with the fact that she had taken an unfair advantage of Laura and Lydia, in not telling them where she was going, that they might have come with her had they been so disposed. She had stolen a march upon them; they would think it unkind. But then she could not have gone to Penninghame had Laura and Lydia been with her. Though they were so much less concerned than she had been, they kept up the Stanton feud with the Musgraves. They had no “interest” in John--on the contrary, they were of the few who still believed that he had “murdered” Lord Stanton--and would have had him hanged if he ever returned to England. They would not have entered the house, or permitted any kind inquiries in their presence. And therefore it was that she had stolen away without letting them know, and was at present conscious--in addition to all the jumble of emotions in her heart--of a certain prick of guilt. The Stantons were a great county family as well as the Musgraves, but in a very different way. When the Musgraves had been at their greatest, the Stantons had been nobody. They were nothing more than persistent, thrifty folk at first, adding field to field, building on ever a new addition to their old house. Then wealth had come, and then local importance; and last of all celebrity. The first who brought anything like fame to the name, and introduced the race to the knowledge of the world, was a soldier, a general under the Duke of Marlborough, who got a baronetcy and a reputation, and had a handsome new coat of arms invented for him--very appropriately gained indeed, on the field of battle, just as the augmentation of the Musgraves’ blazon had been gained, but a few hundred years too late unfortunately, and therefore not telling for nearly so much as if it had been won in the fifteenth century. The next man was a lawyer, who so cultivated that profession that it brought his son, in the reign of the Georges, to the bench, and a peerage--and since that time the family had taken their place among the magnates of the north country. Young Walter Lord Stanton was a much greater man than John Musgrave, though not half so great a man in one sense of the word. Two or three generations, however, tell just as much upon the individual mind as twenty, and the young peer was conscious of all his advantages over the commoner, without any sense of inferiority in point of race. And now the other Lord Stanton, Geoffrey, who had succeeded that unfortunate young man, was the greatest personage of his