nfidence and command her respect. He trembled when he thought of her
as the wife of a man whose rank would expose her to all fashionable
temptations, and whose character would leave her without a guide or
protector.

The Marquess, who obeyed his grandmother from habit, and who had
lethargically sanctioned her proposals to Darrell, evinced the liveliest
emotion he had ever yet betrayed when he learned that his hand was
rejected. And if it were possible for him to carry so small a sentiment
aspique into so large a passion as hate, from that moment he aggrandised
his nature into hatred. He would have given half his lands to have
spited Guy Darrell. Mrs. Lyndsay took care to be at hand to console him,
and the Marchioness was grateful to her for taking that trouble some
task upon herself. And in the course of their conversation Mrs. Lyndsay
contrived to drop into his mind the egg of a project which she took a
later occasion to hatch under her plumes of down. "There is but one
kind of wife, my dear Montfort, who could increase your importance: you
should marry a beauty; next to royalty ranks beauty." The Head nodded,
and seemed to ruminate for some moments, and then _apropos des bottes_,
it let fall this mysterious monosyllable, "Shoes." By what process of
ratiocination the Head had thus arrived at the feet, it is not for me to
conjecture. All I know is that, from that moment, Mrs. Lyndsay bestowed
as much thought upon Caroline's chaussure as if, like Cinderella,
Caroline's whole destiny in this world hung upon her slipper. With the
feelings and the schemes that have been thus intimated, this sensible
lady's mortification may well be conceived when she was startled by
Darrell's proposal, not to herself, but to her daughter. Her egotism was
profoundly shocked, her worldliness cruelly thwarted. With Guy Darrell
for her own spouse, the Marquess of Montfort for her daughter's, Mrs.
Lyndsay would have been indeed a considerable personage in the world.
But to lose Darrell for herself, and the Marquess altogether--the idea
was intolerable! Yet, since to have refused at once for her portionless
daughter a man in so high a position, and to whom her own obligations
were so great, was impossible, she adopted a policy, admirable for the
craft of its conception and the dexterity of its execution. In exacting
the condition of a year's delay, she made her motives appear so loftily
disinterested, so magnanimously friendly! She could never for