strong common sense, much knowledge of human nature, egotistical,
worldly, scheming, heartless, but withal so pleasing, so gentle, so
bewitchingly despotic, that it was like living with an electrobiologist,
who unnerves you by a look to knock you down with a feather. In only
one great purpose of her life had Mrs. Lyndsay failed. When Darrell,
rich by the rewards of his profession and the bequest of his namesake,
had entered Parliament, and risen into that repute which confers solid
and brilliant station, Mrs. Lyndsay conceived the idea of appropriating
to herself his honours and his wealth by a second Hymen. Having so long
been domesticated in his house during the life of Mrs. Darrell, an
intimacy as of near relations had been established between them. Her
soft manners attached to her his children; and after Mrs. Darrell's death
rendered it necessary that she should find a home of her own, she had an
excuse, in Matilda's affection for her and for Caroline, to be more
frequently before Darrell's eyes, and consulted by him yet more
frequently, than when actually a resident in his house. To her Darrell
confided the proposal which had been made to him by the old Marchioness
of Montfort, for an alliance between her young grandson and his sole
surviving child. Wealthy as was the House of Vipont, it was amongst its
traditional maxims that wealth wastes if not perpetually recruited.
Every third generation, at farthest, it was the duty of that house to
marry an heiress. Darrell's daughter, just seventeen, not yet brought
out, would be an heiress, if he pleased to make her so, second to none
whom the research of the Marchioness had detected within the drawing-
rooms and nurseries of the three kingdoms. The proposal of the venerable
peeress was at first very naturally gratifying to Darrell. It was an
euthanasia for the old knightly race to die into a House that was an
institution in the empire, and revive phoenix-like in a line of peers,
who might perpetuate the name of the heiress whose quarterings they would
annex to their own, and sign themselves "Darrell Montfort." Said Darrell