So the baby was weaned.  He did not howl under the process so much as his father expected.  He lost his cheerful red hue and grew thin; he was indifferent to things around him, so that people thought poorly of his intelligence, and the nurse shook her head and said it was a “bad sign when they took no notice.”  Gradually, very gradually, his features settled into an expression of disillusionment, curious in one so young.  Perhaps he bore in his blood reminiscences, forebodings of that wonderful and terrible world he had been in such a hurry to enter.  He was Tyson’s son and heir.

And that other baby, Mrs. Nevill Tyson, so violently weaned from the joy of motherhood, she too grew pale and thin; she too was indifferent to things around her, and she took very little notice of her son.

By a strange and unfortunate coincidence Captain Stanistreet had not been seen in Drayton for the space of five months; and coupling this fact with Mrs. Nevill Tyson’s altered looks, the logical mind of Drayton Parva drew its own conclusions.

CHAPTER VII

SIR PETER’S NEW CLOTHES

Tyson had not married in order to improve his social position; he had married because he was in love as he had never been in love before.  He would have married a barmaid, if necessary, for the same reason.  He was not long in finding out that he owed his unpopularity in a great measure to his marriage.  To the curious observer this consciousness of his mistake was conspicuous in his manner. (It was to be hoped that his wife was not a curious observer.) And Sir Peter made matters no better by going about declaring that Mrs. Nevill Tyson was the loveliest woman in Leicestershire, when everybody knew that his wife had flatly refused to call on her.  By this time Tyson was quite aware that his standing in the county had depended all along on the support which the Morleys were pleased to give him.  They had taken him up in the beginning, and his position had seemed secure.  If at that ripe moment he had chosen to strengthen it by a marriage with Lady Morley’s dearest friend, he might have been anything he pleased.  Miss Batchelor of Meriden would have proved a still more powerful ally than Sir Peter.  She would have been as ambitious for him as he could have been for himself.  By joining the estates of Thorneytoft and Meriden, Nevill Tyson, Esquire, would have become one of the largest land-owners in Leicestershire, when in all probability he would have known the joy of representing his county in Parliament.  He was born for life on a large scale, a life of excitement and action; and there were times when a political career presented itself to his maturer fancy as the end and crown of existence.  All this might have been open to him if he had chosen; if, for instance, this clever man had not cherished a rooted objection to the society of clever women.  As it was, his marriage had made him the best-abused man in those parts.