ther ground."

"But I am to understand that you _do_ oppose them?"

The Countess held back her answer a few seconds, to take a last look at
it before sending it to press. Then she said decisively:--"Yes." She
made no softening reservation. She had already said why.

He considered it his duty to soften it for her. "On the ground of his
eyesight.... This is a sad business.... I gather that you empower me to
repeat to my wife that you are--quite naturally, I admit--are
unreconciled.... Or, at least, only partly reconciled to----"

"Unreconciled. I won't make any pretences, Sir Hamilton. I do _not_
think there need be any nonsense between us. I am the girl's mother, and
it is my duty to speak plain, for her sake."

"My wife will entirely agree with you."

"I hope so. But I am not sorry that I should have an opportunity of
speaking freely to you. This is the first I have had. I wish you to know
without disguise exactly how this marriage of Gwen and your Adrian--if
it ever comes off--will present itself to me, as the girl's mother."

Sir Hamilton inclined his head slightly, which may have meant:--"I am
prepared to listen to you as the boy's father, and his mother's proxy."

"As the girl's mother," repeated the lady. "I shall continue to think,
as I think now, that there is an _unreal_ element in my daughter's ... a
... regard for your son."

"An unreal element! Very often is, in young ladies' predilections for
young gentlemen."

The Countess rushed on to avoid a complex abstract subject, with
pitfalls galore. "Which may very well endanger her future.... Well!--may
endanger the happiness of both.... I don't mean that she isn't in love
with him--whatever the word means, and sometimes one hardly knows. I
mean now that she is under an influence which may last, or may not, but
which might never have existed but for ... but for the accident."

"My wife has said the same thing, more than once." Her ladyship could
have dispensed with this constant reference to the late Miss
Abercrombie. She felt that it put her at a disadvantage.

"And the Earl entirely agrees with me," said she. For why should her
ladyship not play a card of the same suit? "There is something I want to
say, and I don't know how to say it. But _he_ said it the other day, and
I felt exactly as he did. He said, as near as I recollect:--'If I had
twenty daughters to give away, I would not grudge one to poor Adrian, if
I thought it would do something to make