“Ryde?” said Adam, ignoring the latter, and very improper, part of this speech.

“Yes, don’t you remember him?”

“Of course I do, but I haven’t seen him since I came home, and — ”

“Oh, no, he’s away. He had to go off to Edinburgh, because one of his Scotch aunts died, and he was a trustee, or some such thing. Adam, you won’t forbid Charlotte to marry him, will you?”

“Good God, I’ve nothing to say in the matter! Do they still wish it?”

“Yes, and you have got something to say! Charlotte isn’t of age yet, and I know you are our guardian.”

“Yes, but — ”

“If you are thinking it wouldn’t be proper to permit anything Papa disliked I can tell you that it wasn’t he, but Mama,” disclosed Lydia helpfully. “He said that she must settle as she liked, but for his part he didn’t care a rush.” She added, after a thoughtful moment: “I shouldn’t wonder at it if you are able to bring Mama round to the notion, now that we are ruined. She won’t like it above half, of course — and I must own that it does seem shockingly wasteful of Charlotte to be squandering herself on Lambert Ryde! However, there’s no need to despair! I’m not acquainted with many young gentlemen, but I do know that I take very well with the old ones, because whenever Papa entertained any of his friends here I went along with them famously! And, from all I can discover, it is the old gentlemen who have the largest fortunes. And I do not see what I have said to make you laugh!”

“No, of course you don’t — pray forgive me!” begged Adam. “I think you must have been talking to Wimmering?”

“No! Why?” she asked, surprised.

“It is precisely the advice he gave me: to contract a Brilliant Alliance!”

“Oh!” she said, subjecting this to profound thought. She shook her head. “No, not you. Charlotte says that when one has formed a connection the very thought of marriage to Another is repugnant.”

Adam, making the discovery that his young sister could be as embarrassing as she was amusing, replied with creditable coolness: “Does she? Well, I expect she must know better than I do, so I shan’t dispute the matter.”

“Did you see Julia when you were in London?” enquired Lydia, impervious to snubs. “The Oversleys removed from Beckenhurst at the beginning of the month, you know.” She observed the slight stiffening of his countenance, and said anxiously: “Ought I not to have mentioned it? But she told me about it herself !”

Realizing that only frankness would serve him, he said: “I don’t know what she may have told you, Lydia, but you’ll oblige me by forgetting it. We did form an attachment, but we were never betrothed. I haven’t yet called in Mount Street, but I must of course do so, when I return to town, and — well, that’s all there is to be said!”

“Do you mean that Lord Oversley won’t let Julia marry you now that you’re ruined?” she demanded.

“He would be a very bad father if he did,” he answered, as cheerfully as he could.

“Well, I think it is wickedly unjust!” she declared. “First you are obliged to settle Papa’s debts, which are no concern of yours, and now you must abandon Julia! Everything falls on you, and you are less to blame than any of us! Mama thinks she is the one to be pitied, but that’s fudge — and you may look as disapproving as you choose, Adam, but it is fudge! In fact, you are the only one of us to be pitied in the least! Mama will have her jointure, Charlotte will marry Lambert, and I have now quite made up my mind to marry a man of fortune!” She smiled warmly at him. “Naturally it would be most disagreeable for you or Charlotte to be obliged to do it, but I shan’t object to it, I assure you! You must know that I am a — a stranger to the tenderer emotions. Except,” she added, in a less elevated strain, “for falling in love with one of the footmen when I was twelve, and that was not a lasting passion, besides being quite ineligible, so we need not consider it. Are you acquainted with any wealthy old gentlemen, Adam?”

“I’m afraid not. And if I were I should conceal them from you! I had liefer by far let Fontley go than see you sacrificed to save it, and though you haven’t yet been in love there’s no saying but what you might be one day, and then what a bore it would be for you to be tied to a wealthy old gentleman!”

“Yes,” she agreed, “but one ought to be ready to make sacrifices for one’s family, I think. And, after all, he might be dead by then!”

“Very true! And if he had survived — though I don’t think it at all likely that he would! — we could always finish him off with a phial of some subtle poison.”

This appealed so strongly to Lydia that she went into a peal of laughter, at which inopportune moment the door opened to admit Lady Lynton, trailing yards of crape, mobled with ‘black lace, and leaning on the arm of her elder daughter. She paused on the threshold, saying in a faint, incredulous voice: “Laughing, my dear ones?”

Charlotte, who was as kind as she was beautiful, said: “It was so delightful to hear! Lydia was always able to make dear Adam laugh, even when he was in pain, wasn’t she, Mama?”

“I am glad to know that there is anyone at Fontley who is able to laugh at this moment,” said Lady Lynton.

There was nothing in her voice or mien to lend colour to this statement, but none of her dear ones ventured to cavil at it. Having completed the discomfiture of the guilty parties by heaving a mournful sigh she allowed Charlotte to support her to a sofa, and sank down upon it Charlotte arranged a cushion behind her head, placed a stool under her feet, and retired to a chair on the other side of the wide hearth, directing a look of anxious enquiry at her brother as she sat down. There was a strong resemblance between them. Both favoured their mama, unlike the larger and darker Lydia, who took after her father. Lady Lynton’s oft-repeated assertion that Charlotte was the image of what she herself had been strained no one’s credulity, for although time had faded the widow’s fair beauty, and domestic trials had implanted a peevish expression on her classic countenance, she was still a remarkably handsome woman.

“I collect,” she said, “that That Man has departed. I might have expected, perhaps, that he would have thought it proper to have taken leave of me. No doubt I must accustom myself to being treated as a person of no account.”

“I’m afraid I must take the blame of that omission on myself, Mama,” said Adam. “Wimmering was anxious to pay his parting respects to you, but I wouldn’t permit it, knowing you to be laid down upon your bed. He charged me with the task of making his apologies.”

“I am only too thankful to have been spared the necessity of seeing him again,” stated her ladyship, somewhat irrationally. “I never liked him, never! And nothing will convince me that our misfortunes are not due to his management of your poor father’s affairs!”

Once again Charlotte intervened. “May we know how matters stand, Adam? We feel they can’t be worse than our conjectures, don’t we, Mama? It can scarcely come as a shock to us, even if we are quite ruined.”

“Nothing could be a shock to me,” said her parent. “After all, I have undergone I have become inured to disaster. I only wish to know when I must expect to find the roof sold over my head.”

“I won’t do that, I promise you, Mama,” Adam replied. “Indeed, I hope that you at least may be able to live in tolerable comfort, even if we can none of us remain at Fontley.”

Charlotte said in a faltering voice: “Must Fontley be sold? Can nothing be done to save it?”

He was looking down at the smouldering logs in the hearth, and answered only with a tiny shake of his head. Tears started to her eyes, but before they could spill over Lydia created a diversion by observing dispassionately that she rather thought Mama was suffering a Spasm.

The widow’s aspect was certainly alarming, and although she revived sufficiently, when her vinaigrette was held under her nose, to express a desire for hartshorn, it was not until a dose of this cordial had been procured by her younger daughter, and held to her lips by Charlotte, that she was able to raise her head from the cushion, and to utter in brave, but failing accents: “Thank you, my dear ones! Pray don’t regard it! It was nothing — merely the agitation of having the dreadful tidings broken to me in such a way — ! You. have been for so long a stranger to your home, dearest Adam, that you could not be expected to know how wretchedly worn down are my poor nerves.”

“You must forgive me, Mama: I had really no intention of oversetting you,” said Adam. “It seemed to me to be cruel to conceal from you what you must learn, sooner or later.”

“No doubt you did as you thought right, my dear son. My first-born!” said the widow, extending to him one frail hand. “But had your brother been spared to me he would have understood how shattering this blow must be to me! Ah, my poor Stephen! always so considerate, so exactly partaking of my sentiments!”

Since the career of her second-born, cut off while he was still up at Oxford, had been distinguished by a sublime disregard for any other considerations than those immediately concerning himself, this ejaculation caused her surviving children to exchange speaking glances.

It was when Adam was struggling to convince her that her jointure and the direst penury were not synonymous terms that Lydia suddenly exclaimed: “So Dawes was right! I didn’t think it in the least, but only see! These odious tradesmen are sending bills for things Papa never bought, Adam!”

He turned his head quickly to discover that she was engaged in studying the accounts he had left on the desk. Before he could intervene she had betrayed an embarrassing gap in her store of worldly knowledge. “Papa never gave you a necklace of emeralds and diamonds, did he, Mama? But here are Rundell & Bridge demanding the most outrageous sum for one! Of all the wicked cheats!”

The effect of this disclosure on the Dowager was galvanic. Reduced to a moribund state by the efforts of her two elder children to portray in attractive colours her future existence, she sat bolt upright, demanding sharply: “What?”

“Lydia, put those papers back on my desk!” commanded Adam, a look of vexation on his face.

“But, Adam — ”

“Flaunting it under my very nose!” said Lady Lynton. “I might have known it! At the Opera, and very vulgar I thought it! Exactly what one would have expected of such a Creature! Oh, it’s all of a piece! We might go in rags, but he would offer a carte blanche to any Cyprian that took his fancy!”

“Good gracious!” exclaimed Lydia, round-eyed with surprise. “You can’t mean that Papa — Papa! — had a — ”

“Hold your tongue!” said Adam briefly, taking the bill out of her hand, and thrusting it into one of the drawers in the desk.

Perceiving that he was seriously displeased she at once begged pardon, but she was obviously so much less concerned with her own indiscretion than with the problem of how any female could welcome the attentions of a gentleman so stricken in years as her father, who had had no fewer than two-and-fifty in his dish, that Charlotte, amongst whose excellencies a sense of humour was absent, later felt obliged to point out to Adam that dear Lydia’s impenitence argued innocence rather than depravity.

Lady Lynton had accepted her lord’s vagaries with well-bred indifference for years, but the emerald necklace, for some cause which her children never discovered, exercised a powerful effect upon her. Indignation brought a flush to her cheeks, and she so far forgot herself as to recall several of his lordship’s previous lapses, declaring, however, that those she had been able to condone. The emerald necklace, which she described as bread snatched from his children’s mouths to hang round the neck of an abandoned female, was, she asserted, Too Much. It was certainly too much for Lydia, who uttered a choked giggle, and thus reclaimed her afflicted parent to a sense of her company. She was, she said, grieved that any child of hers could be so totally devoid of delicacy, or proper feeling. She seemed to derive some slight comfort from the reflection that Lydia had always been just like her father; but that damsel’s imperfections naturally challenged comparison with the infant Maria’s virtues, and led the widow to bemoan the cruelty of Fate, which had reft from her the two children who would have supported and consoled her in her hour of need. One thing leading to another, it was not long before Adam found himself convicted of gross insensibility; while as for Charlotte, who was doing her best to soothe her mama, Lady Lynton wondered that she could hold up her head after her wilful refusal to avail herself of the opportunity offered her to restore the fallen fortunes of her family.