concert was not like a ball or any customary party. An unmarried girl
might very properly go to a concert under such circumstances as now
existed without any special invitation. Lady Macleod ought to have
known her adopted niece better. Alice was immoveable. As a matter
of course she was immoveable. Lady Macleod had seldom been able to
persuade her to anything, and ought to have been well sure that, of
all things, she could not have persuaded her to this.

Then, at last, they came to another subject, as to which Lady Macleod
declared that she had specially come on this special morning,
forgetting, probably, that she had already made the same assertion
with reference to the concert. But in truth the last assertion was
the correct one, and on that other subject she had been hurried
on to say more than she meant by the eagerness of the moment. All
the morning she had been full of the matter on which she was now
about to speak. She had discussed it quite at length with Lady
Midlothian;--though she was by no means prepared to tell Alice
Vavasor that any such discussion had taken place. From the concert,
and the effect which Lady Midlothian's countenance might have upon
Mr Grey's future welfare, she got herself by degrees round to a
projected Swiss tour which Alice was about to make. Of this Swiss
tour she had heard before, but had not heard who were to be Miss
Vavasor's companions until Lady Midlothian had told her. How it had
come to pass that Lady Midlothian had interested herself so much in
the concerns of a person whom she did not know, and on whom she in
her greatness could not be expected to call, I cannot say; but from
some quarter she had learned who were the proposed companions of
Alice Vavasor's tour, and she had told Lady Macleod that she did not
at all approve of the arrangement.

"And when do you go, Alice?" said Lady Macleod.

"Early in July, I believe. It will be very hot, but Kate must be back
by the middle of August." Kate Vavasor was Alice's first cousin.

"Oh! Kate is to go with you?"

"Of course she is. I could not go alone, or with no one but George.
Indeed it was Kate who made up the party."

"Of course you could not go alone with George," said Lady Macleod,
very grimly. Now George Vavasor was Kate's brother, and was therefore
also first cousin to Alice. He was heir to the old squire down in
Westmoreland, with whom Kate lived, their father being dead. Nothing,
it would seem, could be more ration