herself, I have heard, that her only child, a
daughter, was from home when this visit was paid.

Mrs. Janet Vandaleur was a high-minded, hard-headed, north-country
woman. She valued long descent, and noble blood, and loyalty to a fallen
dynasty like a Scotchwoman, but, like a Scotchwoman, she also respected
capability and energy and endurance. She combined a romantic heart with
a practical head in a way peculiar to her nation. She knew the pedigree
of every family (who had a pedigree) north of the Tweed, and was,
probably, the best housekeeper in Great Britain. She devoutly believed
her own husband to be as perfect as mortal man may be here below, whilst
in some separate compartment of her brain she had the keenest sense of
the defects and weaknesses which he inherited, and dreaded nothing more
than to see her daughter mated with one of the helpless Vandaleurs.

This daughter, with much of her mother's strong will and practical
capacity, had got her father's _physique_ and a good deal of his
artistic temperament. Dreading the development of _de Vandaleur_
qualities in her, the mother made her education studiously practical
and orderly. She had, like most Scotch matrons of her type, too good a
gift for telling family stories, and too high a respect for ancestral
traditions, to have quite kept herself from amusing her daughter's
childhood with tales of the de Vandaleur greatness. But after her
husband discovered his young relative, and as their daughter grew up,
she purposely avoided the subject, which had, probably, the sole effect
of increasing her daughter's interest in the family romance. Mrs. Janet
knew the de Vandaleur pedigree as well as her own, and had shown a
miniature of the late Duke in his youth to her daughter as a child on
many occasions; when she had also alluded to the fact that the title by
birth was undoubtedly in the exiled branch of the family. Miss Vandaleur
was not ignorant that the young gentleman who had just completed his
education was, if every one had their rights, Monsieur le Duc; and she
was as much disappointed to have missed seeing him as her mother was
glad that they had not met.

For Bertrand de Vandaleur had all the virtues and the weaknesses of his
family in intense proportions. He had a hopeless ignorance of the value
of money, which was his strongest condemnation before his Scotch cousin.
He was high-minded, chivalrous, in some points accomplished, charming,
and tender-hearted. But