e presence was always pleasant to
her, whose words and acts towards her extorted her approbation, whose
thoughts seemed to her to be always good and manly. Of course she
had not loved him, because she had previously known Hugh Stanbury.
There could be no comparison between the two men. There was a
brightness about Hugh which Lord Peterborough could not rival.
Otherwise,--except for this reason,--it seemed to her to be
impossible that any young woman should fail to love Lord Peterborough
when asked to do so.

About the middle of September there came a very happy time for her,
when Hugh was asked down to shoot partridges,--in the doing of which,
however, all his brightness did not bring him near in excellence to
his host. Lord Peterborough had been shooting partridges all his
life, and shot them with a precision which excited Hugh's envy. To
own the truth, Stanbury did not shoot well, and was treated rather
with scorn by the gamekeeper; but in other respects he spent three or
four of the happiest days of his life. He had his work to do, and
after the second day over the stubbles, declared that the exigencies
of the D. R. were too severe to enable him to go out with his gun
again; but those rambles about the park with Nora, for which, among
the exigencies of the D. R., he did find opportunity, were never to
be forgotten.

"Of course I remember that it might have been mine," she said,
sitting with him under an old, hollow, withered sloping stump of an
oak, which still, however, had sufficient of a head growing from one
edge of the trunk to give them the shade they wanted; "and if you
wish me to own to regrets,--I will."

"It would kill me, I think, if you did; and yet I cannot get it out
of my head that if it had not been for me your rank and position in
life might have been so--so suitable to you."

"No, Hugh; there you're wrong. I have thought about it a good deal,
too; and I know very well that the cold beef-steak in the cupboard is
the thing for me. Caroline will do very well here. She looks like a
peeress, and bears her honours grandly; but they will never harden
her. I, too, could have been magnificent with fine feathers. Most
birds are equal to so much as that. I fancy that I could have
looked the part of the fine English lady, and could have patronised
clergymen's wives in the country, could have held my own among my
peers in London, and could have kept Mrs. Crutch in order; but it
would have hardened me, and