ght-faced little boy, for
instance, to go about with me in my carriage. Why did you not bring
him, Lady Glencora?"

"I came out in my penitential sheet, and when one goes in that guise,
one goes alone. I had half a mind to walk."

"You will bring him soon?"

"Oh, yes. He was very anxious to know the other day who was the
beautiful lady with the black hair."

"You did not tell him that the beautiful lady with the black hair was
a possible aunt, was a possible--? But we will not think any more of
things so horrible."

"I told him nothing of my fears, you may be sure."

"Some day, when I am a very old woman, and when his father is quite
an old duke, and when he has a dozen little boys and girls of his
own, you will tell him the story. Then he will reflect what a madman
his great-uncle must have been, to have thought of making a duchess
out of such a wizened old woman as that."

They parted the best of friends, but Lady Glencora was still of
opinion that if the lady and the Duke were to be brought together at
Matching, or elsewhere, there might still be danger.

CHAPTER LXIII

Showing How the Duke Stood His Ground

Mr. Low the barrister, who had given so many lectures to our friend
Phineas Finn, lectures that ought to have been useful, was now
himself in the House of Commons, having reached it in the legitimate
course of his profession. At a certain point of his career, supposing
his career to have been sufficiently prosperous, it becomes natural
to a barrister to stand for some constituency, and natural for him
also to form his politics at that period of his life with a view to
his further advancement, looking, as he does so, carefully at the age
and standing of the various candidates for high legal office. When a
man has worked as Mr. Low had worked, he begins to regard the bench
wistfully, and to calculate the profits of a two years' run in the
Attorney-Generalship. It is the way of the profession, and thus a
proper and sufficient number of real barristers finds its way into
the House. Mr. Low had been angry with Phineas because he, being a
barrister, had climbed into it after another fashion, having taken
up politics, not in the proper way as an assistance to his great
profession, but as a profession in itself. Mr. Low had been quite
sure that his pupil had been wrong in this, and that the error would
at last show itself, to his pupil's cost. And Mrs. Low had been more
sure than Mr. Low, having not