’I agreed to no such thing, Lady Arabella; never, never.  I not only never agreed that Mary had been imprudent, but I will not agree to it now, and will not allow any one to assert it in my presence without contradicting it:’  and then the doctor worked away at the thigh-bones in a manner that did rather alarm her ladyship.

’At any rate, you thought that the young people had better be kept apart.’

’No; neither did I think that:  my niece, I felt sure, was safe from danger.  I knew that she would do nothing that would bring either her or me to shame.’

‘Not to shame,’ said the lady apologetically, as it were, using the word perhaps not exactly in the doctor’s sense.

‘I felt no alarm for her,’ continued the doctor, ’and desired no change.  Frank is your son, and it is for you to look to him.  You thought proper to do so by desiring Mary to absent herself from Greshamsbury.’

‘Oh, no, no, no!’ said Lady Arabella.

’But you did, Lady Arabella; and as Greshamsbury is your home, neither I nor my niece had any ground of complaint.  We acquiesced, not without much suffering, but we did acquiesce; and you, I think, can have no ground of complaint against me.’

Lady Arabella had hardly expected that the doctor would reply to her mild and conciliatory exordium with so much sternness.  He had yielded so easily to her on the former occasion.  She did not comprehend that when she uttered her sentence of exile against Mary, she had given an order which she had the power of enforcing; but that obedience to that order had now placed Mary altogether beyond her jurisdiction.  She was, therefore, a little surprised, and for a few moments overawed by the doctor’s manner; but she soon recovered herself, remembering, doubtless, that fortune favours none but the brave.

‘I make no complaint, Dr Thorne,’ she said, after assuming a tone more befitting a De Courcy than that hitherto used, ’I make no complaint either as regards you or Mary.’

‘You are very kind, Lady Arabella.’

’But I think that it is my duty to put a stop, a peremptory stop to anything like a love affair between my son and your niece.’

’I have not the least objection in life.  If there is such a love affair, put a stop to it—­that is, if you have the power.’

Here the doctor was doubtless imprudent.  But he had begun to think that he had yielded sufficiently to the lady; and he had begun to resolve, also, that though it would not become him to encourage even the idea of such a marriage, he would make Lady Arabella understand that he thought his niece quite good enough for her son, and that the match, if regarded as imprudent, was to be regarded as equally imprudent on both sides.  He would not suffer that Mary and her heart and feelings and interest should be altogether postponed to those of the young heir; and, perhaps, he was unconsciously encouraged in this determination by the reflection that Mary herself might perhaps become a young heiress.