wo worlds
like Mahomet's coffin.

The butler announced that his lordship's dinner was served.

'Come along, Molly,' said Maulevrier; 'come and tell me about the
terriers, while I eat my dinner.'

Mary hesitated, glanced doubtfully at her grandmother, who made no sign,
and then slipped out of the room, hanging fondly on her brother's arm,
and almost forgetting that there was any such person as Mr. Hammond in
existence.

When these three were gone Lady Lesbia expressed herself strongly upon
Maulevrier's folly in bringing such a person as Mr. Hammond to Fellside.

'What are we to do with him, grandmother?' she said, pettishly. 'Is he
to live with us, and be one of us, a person of whose belongings we know
positively nothing, who owns that his people are common?'

'My dear, he is your brother's friend, and we have the right to suppose
he is a gentleman.'

'Not on that account,' said Lesbia, more sharply than her wont. 'Didn't
he make a friend, or almost a friend of Jack Howell, the huntsman, and
of Ford, the wrestler. I have no confidence in Maulevrier's ideas of
fitness.'

'We shall find out all about this Mr. Hamleigh--no Hammond--in a day or
two,' replied her ladyship, placidly; 'and in the meantime we must
tolerate him, and be grateful to him if he reconcile Maulevrier to
remaining at Fellside for the next six weeks.'

Lesbia was silent. She did not consider Maulevrier's presence at
Fellside an unmitigated advantage, or, indeed, his presence anywhere.
Those two were not sympathetic. Maulevrier made fun of his elder
sister's perfections, chaffed her intolerably about the great man she
was going to captivate, in her first season, the great houses in which
she was going to reign. Lesbia despised him for that neglect of all his
opportunities of culture which had left him, after the most orthodox and
costly curriculum, almost as ignorant as a ploughboy. She despised a man
whose only delight was in horse and hound, gun and fishing-tackle. Molly
would have cared very little for the guns or the fishing-tackle perhaps
in the abstract; but she cared for everything that interested
Maulevrier, even to the bagful of rats which were let loose in the
stable-yard sometimes, for the education of a particularly game
fox-terrier.

There was plenty of talk and laughter at the dinner-table, while the
Countess and Lady Lesbia conversed gravely and languidly in the
dimly-lighted drawing-room. The dinner was excellent, and both
tr