d the proposal which had been made to him by the old Marchioness
of Montfort, for an alliance between her young grandson and his sole
surviving child. Wealthy as was the House of Vipont, it was amongst
its traditional maxims that wealth wastes if not perpetually recruited.
Every third generation, at farthest, it was the duty of that house to
marry an heiress. Darrell's daughter, just seventeen, not yet brought
out, would be an heiress, if he pleased to make her so, second to
none whom the research of the Marchioness had detected within the
drawing-rooms and nurseries of the three kingdoms. The proposal of the
venerable peeress was at first very naturally gratifying to Darrell. It
was an euthanasia for the old knightly race to die into a House that
was an institution in the empire, and revive phoenix-like in a line of
peers, who might perpetuate the name of the heiress whose quarterings
they would annex to their own, and sign themselves "Darrell Montfort."
Said Darrell inly, "On the whole, such a marriage would have pleased
my poor father." It did not please Mrs. Lyndsay. The bulk of Darrell's
fortune thus settled away, he himself would be a very different match
for Mrs. Lyndsay; nor was it to her convenience that Matilda should be
thus hastily disposed of, and the strongest link of connection between
Fulham and Carlton Gardens severed. Mrs. Lyndsay had one golden rule,
which I respectfully point out to ladies who covet popularity and power:
she never spoke ill of any one whom she wished to injure. She did not,
therefore, speak ill of the Marquess to Darrell, but she so praised him
that her praise alarmed. She ought to know the young peer well; she was
a good deal with the Marchioness, who liked her pretty manners. Till
then, Darrell had only noticed this green Head of the Viponts as a
neat-looking Head, too modest to open its lips. But he now examined the
Head with anxious deliberation, and finding it of the poorest possible
kind of wood, with a heart to match, Guy Darrell had the audacity to
reject, though with great courtesy, the idea of grafting the last plant
of his line on a stem so pithless. Though, like men who are at once very
affectionate and very busy, he saw few faults in his children, or indeed
in any one he really loved, till the fault was forced on him, he could
not but be aware that Matilda's sole chance of becoming a happy and safe
wife was in uniting herself with such a husband as would at once win her
co