ted to share their joy, and was as happy as we
were, perhaps doubly so, since he had beheld with despair Harold's
early infatuation and its results, which had made him fear, during
those three wretched years, that all the lad's great and noble gifts
would be lost in the coarse excesses of his wild life, with barbarous
prosperity without, and a miserable, hardening home. That he should
have been delivered from it, still capable of refinement, still young
and fresh enough for a new beginning, had been a cause of great joy,
and now that all should be repaired by a true and worthy love, had
seemed beyond hope. We built our castles over the fire that evening,
Harold had already marked out with his eye the tract of Neme Heath
which he would reclaim; and the little he had already set me on doing
among the women and children at the potteries, had filled us with
schemes as to what Viola was to carry out.

Some misgivings there were even then. Lady Diana was not to be
expected to like Harold's L1,200 a year as well as Piggy's heirship to
the Erymanth coronet, or any of the other chances that might befall an
attractive girl of twenty.

For coldness and difficulties we were prepared, but not for the
unqualified refusal with which she met Harold the next morning,
grounding all on the vague term, "circumstances," preventing his even
seeing Viola, and cutting short the interview in the manner of a grande
dame whose family had received an insult.

Dermot, however, not only raging, but raving, on his side, assured him
of the staunchness of his sister, and her resolve to hold by him
through everything; and further, in sundry arguments with his mother,
got to the bottom of the "circumstances." She had put away from
herself the objection to the convict birth and breeding, by being
willing to accept Eustace, to whom exactly the same objections applied;
and when she called Eustace a man of more education and manners, her
son laughed in her face at the comparison of "that idiot" with a man
like Harold.

Then came the "past life," a much more tangible objection, but Dermot
was ready there, declaring that whatever Harold had done, considering
his surroundings, was much less heinous than his own transgressions,
after such a bringing up as his, and would his mother say that nobody
ought to marry him? Besides, to whom had she given Di? They were not
arguments that Lady Diana accepted, but she weakened her own cause by
trying to reinfor