I, though?" said Lord Fallowfeild. "I know perfectly well how I
should regard it myself."

"You do not take the advantages sufficiently into consideration, papa.
Of course with their enormous wealth they can afford to do
anything."--Mr. Winterbotham's income was far from princely at this
period, and Lady Alicia was liable to be at once envious of, and
injured by, the riches of others. Her wardrobe was limited. She was,
this morning, vexatiously conscious of a warmer hue in the back pleats
than in the front breadth of her mauve, cashmere dress, sparsely
decorated with bows of but indifferently white ribbon. "It has enabled
them to make an immense success. One really gets rather tired of
hearing about them. But everybody goes to their house, you know, and
says that he is perfectly charming."

"Half the parents in London would jump at the chance of one of their
girls making such a marriage,"--this from Lady Louisa.

Mr. Quayle looked over his shoulder and registered a conviction that
his father did not belong to that active, parental moiety. He sat
stubbornly on a straight-backed, white-and-gold chair, his hands
clasped on the top of his favourite, gold-headed walking-stick. He had
refused to part with this weapon on entering the house. It gave him a
sense of authority, of security. Meanwhile his habitually placid and
infantile countenance wore an expression of the acutest worry.

"Would they, though?" he said, in response to his daughter's
information regarding the jumping moiety.--"Well, I shouldn't. In point
of fact, I don't. All that you and Alicia tell me may be perfectly
true, my dear Louisa. I would not, for a moment, attempt to discredit
your statements. And I don't wish to be intemperate.--Stupid thing
intemperance, sign of weakness, intemperance.--Still I must repeat, and
I do repeat, I repeat clearly, that I do not approve of this
engagement."

"Did not I prophesy long, long ago what my father's attitude would be,
Louisa?" Mr. Quayle murmured gently, over his shoulder.

Then he fell to contemplating the portrait of his brother Guy, aged
seven, who was represented arrayed in a brown-holland blouse of
singular formlessness confined at the waist by a black leather belt,
and carrying, cupid-like, in his hands a bow and arrows decorated with
sky-blue ribbons.--"Were my brothers and I actually such appallingly
insipid-looking little idiots?" he asked himself. "In that case the
years do bring compensations. We r