imes_ and the _Morning Post_ were
dignified and reticent, and she did not read, and was indeed scarcely
cognisant of the existence of most of the others. But the faintest
reference to the trial was enough, it need hardly be said, to make the
blood boil in her veins.

It was a curious thing in her state of mind, and with the feelings she
had towards her husband's family, that one of the first things she did
on establishing herself in her Ebury Street rooms, was to look for an
old "Peerage" which had lain for several years she remembered on a
certain shelf. Genteel lodgings in Ebury Street which did not possess
somewhere an old "Peerage" would be out of the world indeed. She found
it in the same corner as of old, where she had noted it so often and
avoided it as if it had been a serpent; but now the first thing she did,
as soon as her tray was brought her, and all necessary explanations
given, and the door shut, was to take the book furtively from its place,
almost as if she were afraid of what she should see. What a list there
was of sons of Lord St. Serf! some she had never known, who died young:
and Reginald in India, and Hal, who was so kind--what a good laugh
he had, she remembered, not a joyless cackle like Mariamne's, a good
natural laugh, and a kind light in his eyes: and he had been kind. She
could remember ever so many things, nothings, things that made a little
difference in the dull, dull cloudy sky of a neglected wife. Poor Hal!
and he too was gone, and St. Serf dying, and---- Pippo the heir!--Pippo
was perhaps, for any thing she knew, Lord Lomond now.

To say that this did not startle Elinor, did not make her heart beat,
did not open new complications and vistas in life, would be a thing
impossible. Pippo Lord Lomond! Pippo, whom she had feared to expose to
his father's influence, whom she had kept apart, who did not know
anything about himself except that he was her son--had she kept and
guarded the boy thus in the very obscurity of life, in the stillest
and most protected circumstances, only to plunge him suddenly at last,
without preparation, without warning, into the fiery furnace of
temptation, into a region where he might pardonably (perhaps) put
himself beyond her influence, beyond her guidance? Poor Elinor! and yet
she was not wholly to be pitied either. For her heart was fired by the
thought of her boy's elevation in spite of herself. It did not occur to
her that such an elevation for him meant som