er boxes and dress
herself for that one evening in the soft embroidered white muslin which
had hitherto served for her best Sunday frock. But Mrs. Dayman insisted
on a careful toilette, and was well satisfied with the result.

"There, Miss Lesley," she said, "you have just your mamma's look--a sort
of finished look, as if you were perfect outside and in!"

Lesley laughed. "That compliment might be taken in two ways, Dayman,"
she said, as she turned to meet her mother at the door. And in a few
minutes she was standing in the gay little French _salon_, where the
earl was conversing with a much younger man in a glare of waxlights.

Lord Courtleroy was a stately-looking man, with perfectly snow-white
hair and beard, an upright carriage, and bright, piercing, blue eyes. A
striking man in appearance, and of exceedingly well-marked
characteristics. The family pride for which he had long been noted
seemed to show itself in his bearing and in every feature as he greeted
his granddaughter, and yet it was softened by a touch of personal
affection with which family pride had nothing whatever to do. For Lord
Courtleroy's feelings towards Lesley were mixed. He saw in her the child
of a man whose very name he detested, who stood as a type to him of all
that was hateful in the bourgeois class. But he also saw in her his own
granddaughter, "poor Alice's girl," whom fate had used so unkindly in
giving her Caspar Brooke for a father. The earl had next to no personal
knowledge of Caspar Brooke. They had not met since the one sad and
stormy interview which they had held together when Lady Alice had left
her husband's house. And Lord Courtleroy was wont to declare that he did
not wish to know anything more of Mr. Brooke. That he was a Radical
journalist, and that he had treated a daughter of the Courtleroys with
shameful unkindness and neglect, was quite enough for the earl. And his
manner to Lesley varied a little according as his sense of her affinity
with his own family or his remembrance of her kinship with Mr. Brooke
was uppermost.

Lesley was too simply filial in disposition to resent or even to remark
on his changes of mood. She admired her grandfather immensely, and was
pleased to hear him comment on her growth and development since she saw
him last. And then the visitor was introduced to her; and to Lesley's
interest and surprise she saw that he was young.

Young men were an unknown quantity to Lesley. She could not remember
th