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Gresham was thus misbehaving himself, and going on as though to him belonged the privilege of falling in love with pretty faces, as it does to ploughboys and other ordinary people, his great interests were not forgotten by those guardian saints who were so anxious to shower down on his head all manner of temporal blessings.

      Another conversation had taken place in the Greshamsbury gardens, in which nothing light had been allowed to present itself; nothing frivolous had been spoken. The countess, the Lady Arabella, and Miss Gresham had been talking over Greshamsbury affairs, and they had latterly been assisted by the Lady Amelia, than whom no de Courcy ever born was more wise, more solemn, more prudent, or more proud. The ponderosity of her qualifications for nobility was sometimes too much even for her mother, and her devotion to the peerage was such, that she would certainly have declined a seat in heaven if offered to her without the promise that it should be in the upper house.

      The subject first discussed had been Augusta’s prospects. Mr Moffat had been invited to Courcy Castle, and Augusta had been taken thither to meet him, with the express intention on the part of the countess, that they should be man and wife. The countess had been careful to make it intelligible to her sister-in-law and niece, that though Mr Moffat would do excellently well for a daughter of Greshamsbury, he could not be allowed to raise his eyes to a female scion of Courcy Castle.

      “Not that we personally dislike him,” said the Lady Amelia; “but rank has its drawbacks, Augusta.” As the Lady Amelia was now somewhat nearer forty than thirty, and was still allowed to walk,

      “In maiden meditation, fancy free,”

      it may be presumed that in her case rank had been found to have serious drawbacks.

      To this Augusta said nothing in objection. Whether desirable by a de Courcy or not, the match was to be hers, and there was no doubt whatever as to the wealth of the man whose name she was to take; the offer had been made, not to her, but to her aunt; the acceptance had been expressed, not by her, but by her aunt. Had she thought of recapitulating in her memory all that had ever passed between Mr Moffat and herself, she would have found that it did not amount to more than the most ordinary conversation between chance partners in a ballroom. Nevertheless, she was to be Mrs Moffat. All that Mr Gresham knew of him was, that when he met the young man for the first and only time in his life, he found him extremely hard to deal with in the matter of money. He had insisted on having ten thousand pounds with his wife, and at last refused to go on with the match unless he got six thousand pounds. This latter sum the poor squire had undertaken to pay him.

      Mr Moffat had been for a year or two M.P. for Barchester; having been assisted in his views on that ancient city by all the de Courcy interest. He was a Whig, of course. Not only had Barchester, departing from the light of other days, returned a Whig member of Parliament, but it was declared, that at the next election, now near at hand, a Radical would be sent up, a man pledged to the ballot, to economies of all sorts, one who would carry out Barchester politics in all their abrupt, obnoxious, pestilent virulence. This was one Scatcherd, a great railway contractor, a man who was a native of Barchester, who had bought property in the neighbourhood, and who had achieved a sort of popularity there and elsewhere by the violence of his democratic opposition to the aristocracy. According to this man’s political tenets, the Conservatives should be laughed at as fools, but the Whigs should be hated as knaves.

      Mr Moffat was now coming down to Courcy Castle to look after his electioneering interests, and Miss Gresham was to return with her aunt to meet him. The countess was very anxious that Frank should also accompany them. Her great doctrine, that he must marry money, had been laid down with authority, and received without doubt. She now pushed it further, and said that no time should be lost; that he should not only marry money, but do so very early in life; there was always danger in delay. The Greshams—of course she alluded only to the males of the family—were foolishly softhearted; no one could say what might happen. There was that Miss Thorne always at Greshamsbury.

      This was more than the Lady Arabella could stand. She protested that there was at least no ground for supposing that Frank would absolutely disgrace his family.

      Still the countess persisted: “Perhaps not,” she said; “but when young people of perfectly different ranks were allowed to associate together, there was no saying what danger might arise. They all knew that old Mr Bateson—the present Mr Bateson’s father—had gone off with the governess; and young Mr Everbeery, near Taunton, had only the other day married a cookmaid.”

      “But Mr Everbeery was always drunk, aunt,” said Augusta, feeling called upon to say something for her brother.

      “Never mind, my dear; these things do happen, and they are very dreadful.”

      “Horrible!” said the Lady Amelia; “diluting the best blood of the country, and paving the way for revolutions.” This was very grand; but, nevertheless, Augusta could not but feel that she perhaps might be about to dilute the blood of her coming children in marrying the tailor’s son. She consoled herself by trusting that, at any rate, she paved the way for no revolutions.

      “When a thing is so necessary,” said the countess, “it cannot be done too soon. Now, Arabella, I don’t say that anything will come of it; but it may: Miss Dunstable is coming down to us next week. Now, we all know that when old Dunstable died last year, he left over two hundred thousand to his daughter.”

      “It is a great deal of money, certainly,” said Lady Arabella.

      “It would pay off everything, and a great deal more,” said the countess.

      “It was ointment, was it not, aunt?” said Augusta.

      “I believe so, my dear; something called the ointment of Lebanon, or something of that sort: but there’s no doubt about the money.”

      “But how old is she, Rosina?” asked the anxious mother.

      “About thirty, I suppose; but I don’t think that much signifies.”

      “Thirty,” said Lady Arabella, rather dolefully. “And what is she like? I think that Frank already begins to like girls that are young and pretty.”

      “But surely, aunt,” said the Lady Amelia, “now that he has come to man’s discretion, he will not refuse to consider all that he owes to his family. A Mr Gresham of Greshamsbury has a position to support.” The de Courcy scion spoke these last words in the sort of tone that a parish clergyman would use, in warning some young farmer’s son that he should not put himself on an equal footing with the ploughboys.

      It was at last decided that the countess should herself convey to Frank a special invitation to Courcy Castle, and that when she got him there, she should do all that lay in her power to prevent his return to Cambridge, and to further the Dunstable marriage.

      “We did think of Miss Dunstable for Porlock, once,” she said, naïvely; “but when we found that it wasn’t much over two hundred thousand, why, that idea fell to the ground.” The terms on which the de Courcy blood might be allowed to dilute itself were, it must be presumed, very high indeed.

      Augusta was sent off to find her brother, and to send him to the countess in the small drawing-room. Here the countess was to have her tea, apart from the outer common world, and here, without interruption, she was to teach her great lesson to her nephew.

      Augusta did find her brother, and found him in the worst of bad society—so at least the stern de Courcys would have thought. Old Mr Bateson and the governess, Mr Everbeery and his cook’s diluted blood, and ways paved for revolutions, all presented themselves to Augusta’s mind when she found her brother walking with no other company than Mary Thorne, and walking with her, too, in much too close proximity.

      How he had contrived to be off with the old love and so soon on with the new, or rather, to be off with the new love and again on with the old, we will not stop to inquire. Had Lady Arabella, in truth, known all her son’s doings in this way, could she have guessed how very nigh he had approached the iniquity of old Mr Bateson, and to the folly of young Mr Everbeery, she would in truth have been in a hurry to send him off to Courcy Castle and Miss Dunstable. Some days before the commencement of our story, young Frank

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