e as selfish as any other person of fashion. She fully understood
the cause of the deference which all the Castlewood family showed to
her--mother, and daughter, and sons,--and being a woman of great humour,
played upon the dispositions of the various members of this family,
amused herself with their greedinesses, their humiliations, their
artless respect for her money-box, and clinging attachment to her purse.
They were not very rich; Lady Castlewood's own money was settled on
her children. The two elder had inherited nothing but flaxen heads from
their German mother, and a pedigree of prodigious distinction. But
those who had money, and those who had none, were alike eager for the
Baroness's; in this matter the rich are surely quite as greedy as the
poor.

So if Madam Bernstein struck her hand on the table, and caused the
glasses and the persons round it to tremble at her wrath, it was because
she was excited with plenty of punch and champagne, which her ladyship
was in the habit of taking freely, and because she may have had a
generous impulse when generous wine warmed her blood, and felt indignant
as she thought of the poor lad yonder, sitting friendless and lonely on
the outside of his ancestors' door; not because she was specially angry
with her relatives, who she knew would act precisely as they had done.

The exhibition of their selfishness and humiliation alike amused her,
as did Castlewood's act of revolt. He was as selfish as the rest of the
family, but not so mean; and, as he candidly stated, he could afford the
luxury of a little independence, having tolerable estate to fall back
upon.

Madam Bernstein was an early woman, restless, resolute, extraordinarily
active for her age. She was up long before the languid Castlewood
ladies (just home from their London routs and balls) had quitted their
feather-beds, or jolly Will had slept off his various potations of
punch. She was up, and pacing the green terraces that sparkled with the
sweet morning dew, which lay twinkling, also, on a flowery wilderness
of trim parterres, and on the crisp walls of the dark box hedges, under
which marble fauns and dryads were cooling themselves, whilst a thousand
birds sang, the fountains plashed and glittered in the rosy morning
sunshine, and the rooks cawed from the great wood.

Had the well-remembered scene (for she had visited it often in
childhood) a freshness and charm for her? Did it recall days of
innocence and happines