inly, "On the whole, such a marriage would have pleased my poor father."
It did not please Mrs. Lyndsay. The bulk of Darrell's fortune thus
settled away, he himself would be a very different match for Mrs.
Lyndsay; nor was it to her convenience that Matilda should be thus
hastily disposed of, and the strongest link of connection between Fulham
and Carlton Gardens severed. Mrs. Lyndsay had one golden rule, which I
respectfully point out to ladies who covet popularity and power: she
never spoke ill of any one whom she wished to injure. She did not,
therefore, speak ill of the Marquess to Darrell, but she so praised him
that her praise alarmed. She ought to know the young peer well; she was
a good deal with the Marchioness, who liked her pretty manners. Till
then, Darrell had only noticed this green Head of the Viponts as a neat-
looking Head, too modest to open its lips. But he now examined the Head
with anxious deliberation, and finding it of the poorest possible kind of
wood, with a heart to match, Guy Darrell had the audacity to reject,
though with great courtesy, the idea of grafting the last plant of his
line on a stem so pithless. Though, like men who are at once very
affectionate and very busy, he saw few faults in his children, or indeed
in any one he really loved, till the fault was forced on him, he could
not but be aware that Matilda's sole chance of becoming a happy and safe
wife was in uniting herself with such a husband as would at once win her
confidence and command her respect. He trembled when he thought of her
as the wife of a man whose rank would expose her to all fashionable
temptations, and whose character would leave her without a guide or
protector.

The Marquess, who obeyed his grandmother from habit, and who had
lethargically sanctioned her proposals to Darrell, evinced the liveliest
emotion he had ever yet betrayed when he learned that his hand was
rejected. And if it were possible for him to carry so small a sentiment