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588 body imagined that Lord Parham had very much to do with the appointment of the commissioner,—who happened to have just engaged himself to Lady Parham's second girl. No young member on the government side, if he wanted office, neglected Lady Parham's invitations, and admission to her more intimate dinners was still almost as much coveted as similar favors had been a generation before in the case of Lady Jersey, or, still earlier, in that of Lady Holland. She was a small old woman, who wore a brown wig, and was a trifle blind of one eye. Her sight, however, was good enough to show her things that escaped most other people; her tongue was rarely at a loss; she was on the whole a good friend, though never an unreflecting one; and what she forgave might be safely reckoned as not worth resenting.

Elizabeth Tranmore received Mary's remark with reluctant consent. Lady Parham—from the English aristocratic standpoint—was not well-born. She had been the daughter of a fashionable singing-master, whose blood was certainly not Christian. And there were many people besides Lady Tranmore who resented her domination.

"It will be so perfectly easy when the moment comes to invent some excuse or other for shelving William's claims," sighed Ashe's mother. "Nobody is indispensable, and if that old woman is provoked,—she will be capable of any mischief."

"What do you want for William?" said Mary, smiling.

"He ought, of course, to have the Home Office!" replied Lady Tranmore, with fire.

Mary vowed that he would certainly have it. "Kitty is so clever, she will understand how important discretion is,—before things go too far."

Lady Tranmore made no answer. She gazed into the fire, and Miss Lyster thought her depressed.

"Has William ever interfered?" she asked, cautiously.

Lady Tranmore hesitated.

"Not that I know of," she said, at last. "Nor will he ever—in the sense in which any ordinary husband would interfere."

"I know! It is as though he had a kind of superstition about it. Isn't there a fairy-story in which an elf marries a mortal on condition that if he ever ill-treats her, her people will fetch her back to Fairyland? One day the husband lost his temper and spoke crossly; instantly there was a crash of thunder, and the elf-wife vanished."

"I don't remember the story. But it's like that—exactly. He said to me once that he would never have asked her to marry him if he had not been able to make up his mind to let her have her own way—never to coerce her."

But having said this, Lady Tranmore repented. It seemed to her she had been betraying William's affairs. She drew her chair back from the fire, and rang to ask if the carriage had arrived. Mary took the hint. She arrayed herself in her cloak, and chatted agreeably about other things till the moment for their departure came.

As they drove through the streets, Lady Tranmore stole a glance at her companion.

"She is really very handsome," she thought,—"much better looking than she was at twenty. What are the men about, not to marry her?"

It was indeed a puzzle. For Mary was increasingly agreeable as the years went on, and had now quite a position of her own in London as a charming woman without angles or apparent egotisms; one of the initiated, besides, whom any dinner-party might be glad to capture. Her relations, near and distant, held so many of the points of vantage in English public life that her word inevitably carried weight. She talked politics, as women of her class must talk them to hold their own; she supported the Church; and she was elegantly charitable, in that popular sense which means that you subscribe to your friends' charities without setting up any of your own. She was rich also,—already in possession of a considerable fortune, inherited from her mother, and prospective heiress of at least as much again from her father, old Sir Richard Lyster, whose house in Somersetshire she managed to perfection. In the season she stayed with various friends, or with Lady Tranmore, Sir Richard being now infirm and preferring the country. There was a younger sister, who was known to have married