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bores. As for Miss Merriville, Mr Trevor felt that she was very well able to take care of herself. He had been dazzled by her beautiful companion, but he retained a vague impression of a self-possessed female, with a slightly aquiline nose, and an air of friendly assurance. He did not think that she would be easily taken-in. Further reflection convinced him that no attempt would be made to trifle with her affections: it was unlikely that so noted a connoisseur of beauty as Alverstoke would deem her worthy of a second glance. In fact, it was even more unlikely that he would in any way bestir himself on her behalf.
    After several days, during which his lordship made no mention of her, and certainly did not go to pay her a morning call, it began to seem as though he had either decided to ignore her, or had forgotten her existence. Mr Trevor knew that it was his duty to remind him, but he refrained, feeling that the moment was unpropitious. His lordship had been obliged to endure three visits—two from his elder sisters, and one from his heir’s widowed mother—all of which had bored him so much that every member of his household took great pains not to put him out of temper. “For I assure you, Mr Wicken,” said his lordship’s top-lofty valet, condescending to his lordship’s butler, “that when he is nettled his lordship can create quite a humdurgeon, as they say.”
    “I am well aware of that, Mr Knapp,” returned his colleague, “being as I have been acquainted with his lordship from his cradle. He reminds me of his father, the late lord, but you, of course, didn’t know him,” he added, depressing pretension.
    His lordship had indeed been sorely tried. Lady Buxted, never one to accept defeat, had come to Alverstoke House, on the flimsiest of pretexts, accompanied by her eldest daughter, who, failing to soften her uncle’s heart by cajolery, had dissolved into tears. But as she was not one of those few, fortunate females who could cry without rendering themselves hideous he was as impervious to her tears as to his sister’s account of the straitened circumstances to which she had been reduced. Only penury, Lady Buxted declared, had compelled her to apply to her brother for his assistance in the all-important duty of launching her dearest Jane into the ton. But her brother, speaking with the utmost amiability, told her that parsimony, not penury, was the correct word; upon which her ladyship lost her temper, and gave him what James, the first footman, who was waiting in the hall, described to his immediate subordinate as a rare bear-garden jaw.
    Mrs Dauntry was his lordship’s second visitor. Like Lady Buxted, she was a widow; and she shared her cousin’s conviction that it was Alverstoke’s bounden duty to provide for her offspring. There the resemblance between them ended. Lady Buxted was frequently designated, by the vulgar, as a hatchet; but no one could have applied such a term to Mrs Dauntry, who presented an appearance of extreme fragility, and bore with noble fortitude all the trials which beset her. As a girl she had been an accredited beauty, but a tendency to succumb to infectious complaints had encouraged her to believe that her constitution was sickly; and it was not long after her marriage that she began (as Lady Jevington and Lady Buxted unkindly phrased it) to quack herself. Her husband’s untimely demise had set the seal on her ill-health: she became the subject of nervous disorders, and embarked on a series of cures and diets, which, since they included such melancholy remedies as goat’s whey (for an imagined consumption), soon reduced her to wraith-like proportions. By the time she was forty she had become so much addicted to invalidism that unless some attractive entertainment was offered her she spent the better part of her days reclining gracefully upon a sofa, with a poor relation in attendance, and a table beside her crowded with bottles and phials which contained Cinnamon Water,