“Fanny!”

He passed the lady and escaped.  As he rode away into the darkness of the lanes he was conscious of an impression which had for the moment checked the happy flutter of blood and pulse.  Was that the long-expected cousin?  Poor Diana!  A common-looking, vulgar young woman—­with a most unpleasant voice and accent.  An unpleasant manner, too, to the servants—­half arrogant, half familiar.  What a hat!—­and what a fringe!—­worthy of some young “lidy” in the Old Kent Road!  The thought of Diana sitting at table with such a person on equal terms pricked him with annoyance; for he had all his mother’s fastidiousness, though it showed itself in different forms.  He blamed Mrs. Colwood—­Diana ought to have been more cautiously guided.  The thought of all the tender preparation made for the girl was both amusing and repellent.

Miss Merton, he understood, was Diana’s cousin on the mother’s side—­the daughter of her mother’s sister.  A swarm of questions suddenly arose in his mind—­questions not hitherto entertained.  Had there been, in fact, a mesalliance—­some disagreeable story—­which accounted, perhaps, for the self-banishment of Mr. Mallory?—­the seclusion in which Diana had been brought up?  The idea was most unwelcome, but the sight of Fanny Merton had inevitably provoked it.  And it led on to a good many other ideas and speculations of a mingled sort connected, now with Diana, now with recollections, pleasant and unpleasant, of the eight or ten years which had preceded his first sight of her.

For Oliver Marsham was now thirty-six, and he had not reached that age without at least one serious attempt—­quite apart from any passages with Alicia Drake—­to provide himself with a wife.  Some two years before this date he had proposed to a pretty girl of great family and no money, with whom he supposed himself ardently in love.  She, after some hesitation, had refused him, and Marsham had had some reason to believe that in spite of his mother’s great fortune and his own expectations, his provenance had not been regarded as sufficiently aristocratic by the girl’s fond parents.  Perhaps had he—­and not Lady Lucy—­been the owner of Tallyn and its L18,000 a year, things might have been different.  As it was, Marsham had felt the affront, as a strong and self-confident man was likely to feel it; and it was perhaps in reaction from it that he had allowed himself those passages with Alicia Drake which had, at least, soothed his self-love.

In this affair Marsham had acted on one of the convictions with which he had entered public life—­that there is no greater help to a politician than a distinguished, clever, and, if possible, beautiful wife.  Distinction, Radical though he was, had once seemed to him a matter of family and “connection.”  But after the failure of his first attempt, “family,” in the ordinary sense, had ceased to attract him.  Personal breeding, intelligence, and charm—­these,