on their entrance. His manner had been reserve itself. The
_hauteur_ of the grandee on his own ground was clearly marked in it, and
Robert could not help fancying that towards himself there had even been
something more. And not one of those phrases which, under the
circumstances, would have been so easy and so gracious, as to Robert's
childish connection with the place, or as to the squire's remembrance of
his father, even though Mrs. Darcy had given him a special opening of
the kind.

The young rector instinctively drew himself together, like one who has
received a blow, as he moved across to the other side of the fireplace
to shake hands with the worthy family doctor, old Meyrick, who was
already well known to him. Catherine, in some discomfort, for she too
had felt their reception at the squire's hands to be a chilling one, sat
down to talk to Mrs. Darcy, disagreeably conscious the while that Rose
and Langham left to themselves were practically _tete-a-tete_, and that,
moreover, a large stand of flowers formed a partial screen between her
and them. She could see, however, the gleam of Rose's upstretched neck,
as Langham, who was leaning on the piano beside her, bent down to talk
to her; and when she looked next she caught a smiling motion of
Langham's head and eyes towards the Romney portrait of Mr. Wendover's
grandmother, and was certain when he stooped afterwards to say something
to his companion, that he was commenting on a certain surface likeness
there was between her and the young auburn-haired beauty of the picture.
Hateful! And they would be sent down to dinner together to a certainty.

The other guests were Lady Charlotte Wynnstay, a cousin of the squire--a
tall, imperious, loud-voiced woman, famous in London society for her
relationships, her audacity, and the _salon_ which in one way or another
she managed to collect round her; her dark, thin, irritable-looking
husband; two neighbouring clerics--the first, by name Longstaffe, a
somewhat inferior specimen of the cloth, whom Robert cordially disliked;
and the other, Mr. Bickerton, a gentle Evangelical, one of those men who
help to ease the harshness of a cross-grained world, and to reconcile
the cleverer or more impatient folk in it to the worries of living.

Lady Charlotte was already known by name to the Elsmeres as the aunt of
one of their chief friends of the neighbourhood--the wife of a
neighbouring squire whose property joined that of Murewell Hall,