his ruin, that he might get his land. What--oh! what if he should
come to be possessed in this way of any of the fair acres of
Framley Court? What if he should become possessed of them all? It
can hardly be wondered at that Lady Lufton should not like
Chaldicotes.

The Chaldicotes set, as Lady Lufton called them, were in every way
opposed to what a set should be according to her ideas. She liked
cheerful, quiet, well-to-do peaple, who loved their Church, their
country, and their Queen, and who were not too anxious to make
noise in the world. She desired that all the farmers round her
should be able to pay their rents without trouble, that all the old
women should have warm flannel petticoats, that the working men
should be saved from rheumatism by healthy food and dry houses,
that they should all be obedient to their pastors and masters--
temporal as well as spiritual. That was her idea of loving her
country. She desired also that the copses should be full of
pheasants, the stubble-field of partridges, and the gorse covers of
foxes; in that way, also, she loved her country. She had ardently
longed, during the Crimean War, that the Russians might be
beaten--but not by the French, to the exclusion of the English, as
had seemed to her to be too much the case; and hardly by the
English under the dictatorship of Lord Palmerston. Indeed, she had
had but little faith in that war after Lord Aberdeen had been
expelled. If, indeed, Lord Derby could have come in! But now as
to this Chaldicotes set. After all, there was nothing so very
dangerous about them; for it was in London, not in the country,
that Mr Sowerby indulged, if he did so indulge, his bachelor
malpractices. Speaking of them as a set, the chief offender was Mr
Harold Smith, or perhaps his wife. He also was a member of