ry; they prick the moral mind to
sit in judgement on the donor. It means, she fears me! Cecil confidently
thought and said of the intriguing woman who managed his patron.

The town-house was open to him. Lord Romfrey was at Steynham. Cecil could
not suppose that he was falling into a pit in entering it. He happened to
be the favourite of the old housekeeper, who liked him for his
haughtiness, which was to her thinking the sign of real English nobility,
and perhaps it is the popular sign, and a tonic to the people. She raised
lamentations over the shame of the locking of the door against him that
awful night, declaring she had almost mustered courage to go down to him
herself, in spite of Mrs. Calling's orders. The old woman lowered her
voice to tell him that her official superior had permitted the French
gentleman and ladies to call her countess. This she knew for a certainty,
though she knew nothing of French; but the French lady who came second
brought a maid who knew English a little, and she said the very
words--the countess, and said also that her party took Mrs. Culling for
the Countess of Romfrey. What was more, my lord's coachman caught it up,
and he called her countess, and he had a quarrel about it with the
footman Kendall; and the day after a dreadful affair between them in the
mews, home drives madam, and Kendall is to go up to her, and down the
poor man comes, and not a word to be got out of him, but as if he had
seen a ghost. 'She have such power,' Cecil's admirer concluded.

'I wager I match her,' Cecil said to himself, pulling at his wristbands
and letting his lower teeth shine out. The means of matching her were not
so palpable as the resolution. First he took men into his confidence.
Then he touched lightly on the story to ladies, with the question, 'What
ought I to do?' In consideration for the Earl of Romfrey he ought not to
pass it over, he suggested. The ladies of the family urged him to go to
Steynham and boldly confront the woman. He was not prepared for that.
Better, it seemed to him, to blow the rumour, and make it the topic of
the season, until Lord Romfrey should hear of it. Cecil had the ear of
the town for a month. He was in the act of slicing the air with his right
hand in his accustomed style, one evening at Lady Elsea's, to protest how
vast was the dishonour done to the family by Mistress Culling, when
Stukely Culbrett stopped him, saying, 'The lady you speak of is the
Countess of Romfre