‘Who is Mr Glascock?  I have not heard a word about Mr Glascock.’  Then Nora was forced to tell the story, was called upon to tell it with all its aggravating details.  By degrees Sir Marmaduke learned that this Mr Glascock, who had desired to be his son-in-law, was in very truth the heir to the Peterborough title and estates, would have been such a son-in-law as almost to compensate, by the brilliance of the connection, for that other unfortunate alliance.  He could hardly control his agony when he was made to understand that this embryo peer had in truth been in earnest.

‘Do you mean that he went down after you into Devonshire?’

‘Yes, papa.’

‘And you refused him then a second time?’

‘Yes, papa.’

’Why, why, why?  You say yourself that you liked him, that you thought that you would accept him.’

’When it came to speaking the word, papa, I found that I could not pretend to love him when I did not love him.  I did not care for him, and I liked somebody else so much better!  I just told him the plain truth and so he went away.’

The thought of all that he had lost, of all that might so easily have been his, for a time overwhelmed Sir Marmaduke, and drove the very memory of Hugh Stanbury almost out of his head; He could understand that a girl should not marry a man whom she did not like; but he could not understand how any girl should not love such a suitor as was Mr Glascock.  And had she accepted this pearl of men, with her position, with her manners and beauty and appearance, such a connection would have been as good as an assured marriage for every one of Sir Marmaduke’s numerous daughters.  Nora was just the woman to look like a great lady, a lady of high rank such a lady as could almost command men to come and throw themselves at her unmarried sisters’ feet.  Sir Marmaduke had believed in his daughter Nora, had looked forward to see her do much for the family; and, when the crash had come upon the Trevelyan household, had thought almost as much of her injured prospects as he had of the misfortune of her sister.  But now it seemed that more than all the good things of what he had dreamed had been proposed to this unruly girl, in spite of that great crash, and had been rejected!  And he saw more than this as he thought.  These good things would have been accepted had it not been for this rascal of a penny-a-liner, this friend of that other rascal Trevelyan, who had come in the way of their family to destroy the happiness of them all!  Sir Marmaduke, in speaking of Stanbury after this, would constantly call him a penny-a-liner, thinking that the contamination of the penny communicated itself to all transactions of the Daily Record.

‘You have made your bed for yourself, Nora, and you must lie upon it.’

‘Just so, papa.’

’I mean that, as you have refused Mr Glascock’s offer, you can never again hope for such an opening in life.’