scandal, in a case where, so to speak, all was scandal.

And meanwhile what new and dolorous truths had Lady Kitty been learning
as to her mother's history and her mother's position? By Jove! it _was_
hard upon the girl. Darrell was right. Why not leave her to her French
friends and relations?--or relinquish her to Lady Grosville? Madame
d'Estrées had seen little or nothing of her for years. She could not,
therefore, be necessary to her mother's happiness, and there was a real
cruelty in thus claiming her, at the very moment of her entrance into
society, where Madame d'Estrées could only stand in her way. For
although many a man whom the girl might profitably marry was to be
found among the mother's guests, the influences of Madame d'Estrées'
"evenings" were certainly not matrimonial. Still the unforeseen was
surely the probable in Lady Kitty's case. What sort of man ought she to
marry--what sort of man could safely take the risks of marrying
her--with that mother in the background?

He descended at the way-side station prescribed to him, and looked round
him for fellow-guests--much as the card-player examines his hand. Mary
Lyster, a cabinet minister--filling an ornamental office and handed on
from ministry to ministry as a kind of necessary appendage, the public
never knew why--the minister's second wife, an attaché from the Austrian
embassy, two members of Parliament, and a well-known journalist--Ashe
said to himself flippantly that so far the trumps were not many. But he
was always reasonably glad to see Mary, and he went up to her, cared for
her bag, and made her put on her cloak, with cousinly civility. In the
omnibus on the way to the house he and Mary gossiped in a corner, while
the cabinet minister and the editor went to sleep, and the two members
of Parliament practised some courageous French on the Austrian attaché.