fitted her ill, but there was a want of adaptability,--a lack of taste
that failed to accord with her florid style of beauty.

She had been a handsome woman when Richard Mayne married her, but a
certain deepening of tints and broadening of contour had not improved
the mistress of Longmead. Her husband was a decided contrast: he was a
small, wiry man, with sharp features that expressed a great deal of
shrewdness. Dick had got his sandy hair; but Richard Mayne the elder
had not his son's honest, kindly eyes. Mr. Mayne's were small and
twinkling; he had a way of looking at people between his half-closed
lids, in a manner half sharp and half jocular.

He was not vulgar, far from it; but he had a homely air about him that
spoke of the self-made man. He was rather fond of telling people that
his father had been in trade in a small way and that he himself had
been the sole architect of his fortune. "Look at Dick," he would say;
"he would never have a penny, that fellow, unless I made it for him:
he has come into the world to find his bread ready buttered. I had to
be content with a crust as I could earn it. The lad's a cut above us
both, though he has the good taste to try and hide it."

This sagacious speech was very true. Dick would never have succeeded
as a business man; he was too full of crotchets and speculations to be
content to run in narrow grooves. The notion of money-making was
abhorrent to him; the idea of a city life, with its hard rubs and
drudgery, was utterly distasteful to him. "One would have to mix with
such a lot of cads," he would say. "English, pure and undefiled, is
not always spoken. If I must work, I would rather have a turn at law
or divinity; the three old women with the eye between them knows
which."

It could not be denied that Dick winced a little at his father's
homely speeches; but in his heart he was both proud and fond of him,
and was given to assert to a few of his closest friends "that, take it
all in all, and looking at other fellows' fathers, he was a rattling
good sort, and no mistake."

When Mrs. Challoner had entered her little protest against her
daughter's acceptance of the invitation, Mrs. Mayne had risen and
kissed her with some effusion as she took her leave.

"It is so nice of you to say this to me; of course I should have been
pleased, delighted to have had Nan with us" (oh, Mrs. Mayne, fie for
shame! when you want your boy to yourself), "but all the same I think
you are