Page:Precaution; a novel by Cooper, James Fenimore.djvu/257

Rh took his seat by the side of his wife in the carriage, thought she was not as handsome as usual.

Lady Chatterton that morning unguardedly laid the foundation of years of misery for her eldest daughter or rather the foundations were already laid in the ill-sorted, and heartless, unprincipled union she had labored with success to effect. But she had that morning stripped the mask from her own character prematurely, and excited suspicions in the breast of her son-in-law, which time only served to confirm, and memory to brood over.

Lord Herriefield had been too long in the world not to understand all the ordinary arts of match-makers and match-hunters. Like most of his own sex who have associated freely with the worst part of the other, his opinions of female excellences were by no means extravagant or romantic. Kate had pleased his eye; she was of a noble family; young, and at that moment interestingly quiet, having nothing particularly in view. She had a taste of her own, and Lord Herrifield was by no means in conformity with it; consequently, she expended none of those pretty little arts upon him which she occasionally practiced, and which his experience would immediately have detected. Her disgust he had attributed to disinterestedness; and as Kate had fixed her eye on a young officer lately returned from France, and her mother on a duke who was mourning the death of a third wife, devising means to console him with a fourth—the viscount had got a good deal enamored with the lady, before either she or her mother took any particular notice that there was such a being in existence. This title was not the most elevated, but it was ancient. His paternal acres were not numerous, but his East India shares were. He was not very young, but he was not very old; and as the duke died of a fit of the gout in the stomach, and the officer ran away with a girl in her teens from a boarding-school, the dowager and her daughter, after thoroughly scanning the fashionable world, determined, for want of a better, that he would do.

It is not to be supposed that the mother and child hold any open communications with each other to this effect.