cs or garden parties. When people in the
neighbourhood wanted to take their friends to see the orchids, they
wrote to Lady Jane first, and made it quite a state affair; and on an
appointed afternoon, the lady of Briarwood received them, richly clad
in a dark velvet gown and a point-lace cap, as if she had just walked
out of an old picture, and there were three or four gardeners in
attendance to open doors, and cut specimen blossoms for the guests.

"She's a splendid woman, admirable in every way," said Roderick to an
Oxford chum, with whom he had been discussing Lady Jane's virtues; "but
if a fellow could have a voice in the matter, she's not the mother I
should have chosen for myself."

Ambition was the leading characteristic of Lady Jane's mind. As a girl,
she had been ambitious lor herself, and that ambition had been
disappointed; as a woman, her ambition transferred itself to her son.
She was the eldest daughter of the Earl of Lodway, a nobleman who had
been considerably overweighted in the handicap of life, having nine
children, seats in three counties, a huge old house in St. James's
Square, and a small income--his three estates consisting of some of the
barrenest and most unprofitable land in Great Britain. Of Lord Lodway's
nine children, five were daughters, and of these Lady Jane was the
eldest and the handsomest. Even in her nursery she had a very distinct
notion that, for her, marriage meant promotion. She used to play at
being married at St. George's, Hanover Square, and would never consent
to have the ceremony performed by lees than two bishops; even though
the part of one hierarch had to be represented by the nursery
hearth-broom. In due course Lady Jane Umleigh made her debut in
society, in all the bloom and freshness of her stately Saxon beauty.
She was admired and talked about, and acknowledged as one of the belles
of that season; her portrait was engraved in the Book of Beauty, and
her ball programmes were always filled with the very best names; but at
the end of the season, Lady Lodway went back to the Yorkshire Wolds
with a biting sense of failure and mortification. Her handsome daughter
had not sent her arrow home to the gold. She had not received a single
offer worth talking about.

"Don't you think you could consent to be married by one bishop and a
dean, Jenny, if the Marquis comes to the scratch soon after the
twelfth?" asked Lady Jane's youngest brother derisively.

He had been made to do b