the stricken old grandmother trembled to think
that these too were the inheritors of their father's shame as well as
of his honours, and watched sickening for the day when the awful
ancestral curse should come down on them.

This dark presentiment also haunted Lord Steyne. He tried to lay the
horrid bedside ghost in Red Seas of wine and jollity, and lost sight of
it sometimes in the crowd and rout of his pleasures. But it always
came back to him when alone, and seemed to grow more threatening with
years. "I have taken your son," it said, "why not you? I may shut you
up in a prison some day like your son George. I may tap you on the
head to-morrow, and away go pleasure and honours, feasts and beauty,
friends, flatterers, French cooks, fine horses and houses--in exchange
for a prison, a keeper, and a straw mattress like George Gaunt's." And
then my lord would defy the ghost which threatened him, for he knew of
a remedy by which he could baulk his enemy.

So there was splendour and wealth, but no great happiness perchance,
behind the tall caned portals of Gaunt House with its smoky coronets
and ciphers. The feasts there were of the grandest in London, but
there was not overmuch content therewith, except among the guests who
sat at my lord's table. Had he not been so great a Prince very few
possibly would have visited him; but in Vanity Fair the sins of very
great personages are looked at indulgently. "Nous regardons a deux
fois" (as the French lady said) before we condemn a person of my lord's
undoubted quality. Some notorious carpers and squeamish moralists
might be sulky with Lord Steyne, but they were glad enough to come when
he asked them.

"Lord Steyne is really too bad," Lady Slingstone said, "but everybody
goes, and of course I shall see that my girls come to no harm." "His
lordship is a man to whom I owe much, everything in life," said the
Right Reverend Doctor Trail, thinking that the Archbishop was rather
shaky, and Mrs. Trail and the young ladies would as soon have missed
going to church as to one of his lordship's parties. "His morals are
bad," said little Lord Southdown to his sister, who meekly
expostulated, having heard terrific legends from her mamma with respect
to the doings at Gaunt House; "but hang it, he's got the best dry
Sillery in Europe!" And as for Sir Pitt Crawley, Bart.--Sir Pitt that
pattern of decorum, Sir Pitt who had led off at missionary meetings--he
never for one moment though