he peerage," said the rector, judiciously, "must be regarded as a
remote chance. There are two cousins between the present peer and Mr.
Grandcourt. It is certainly a serious reflection how death and other
causes do sometimes concentrate inheritances on one man. But an excess
of that kind is to be deprecated. To be Sir Mallinger Grandcourt
Mallinger--I suppose that will be his style--with corresponding
properties, is a valuable talent enough for any man to have committed
to him. Let us hope it will be well used."

"And what a position for the wife, Gwendolen!" said Mrs. Gascoigne; "a
great responsibility indeed. But you must lose no time in writing to
Mrs. Mompert, Henry. It is a good thing that you have an engagement of
marriage to offer as an excuse, else she might feel offended. She is
rather a high woman."

"I am rid of that horror," thought Gwendolen, to whom the name of
Mompert had become a sort of Mumbo-jumbo. She was very silent through
the evening, and that night could hardly sleep at all in her little
white bed. It was a rarity in her strong youth to be wakeful: and
perhaps a still greater rarity for her to be careful that her mother
should not know of her restlessness. But her state of mind was
altogether new: she who had been used to feel sure of herself, and
ready to manage others, had just taken a decisive step which she had
beforehand thought that she would not take--nay, perhaps, was bound not
to take. She could not go backward now; she liked a great deal of what
lay before her; and there was nothing for her to like if she went back.
But her resolution was dogged by the shadow of that previous resolve
which had at first come as the undoubting movement of her whole being.
While she lay on her pillow with wide-open eyes, "looking on darkness
which the blind do see," she was appalled by the idea that she was
going to do what she had once started away from with repugnance. It was
new to her that a question of right or wrong in her conduct should
rouse her terror; she had known no compunction that atoning caresses
and presents could not lay to rest. But here had come a moment when
something like a new consciousness was awaked. She seemed on the edge
of adopting deliberately, as a notion for all the rest of her life,
what she had rashly said in her bitterness, when her discovery had
driven her away to Leubronn:--that it did not signify what she did; she
had only to amuse herself as best she could. That lawless