He was the first eminently respectable man whom Miss Paget had ever encountered in familiar intercourse, and she was regarding him attentively, as an individual with scientific tastes might regard some natural curiosity.

Chapter V - At the Lawn

*

Life at the Lawn went by very smoothly for Mr. Sheldon's family. Georgy was very happy in the society of a companion who seemed really to have a natural taste for the manufacture of pretty little head-dresses from the merest fragments of material in the way of lace and ribbon. Diana had all that versatile cleverness and capacity for expedients which is likely to be acquired in a wandering and troubled life. She had learned more in her three years of discomfort with her father than in all the undeviating course of the Hyde-Lodge studies; she had improved her French at one table d'hôte, her German at another; she had caught some new trick of style in every concert-room, some fresh combination of costume on every racecourse; and, being really grateful for Charlotte's disinterested affection, she brought all her accomplishments to bear to please her friend and her friend's household.

In this she succeeded admirably. Mrs. Sheldon found her daughter's society much more delightful now that the whole pressure of Charlotte's intellect and vitality no longer fell entirely upon herself. She liked to sit lazily in her arm-chair while the two girls chattered at their work, and she could venture an occasional remark, and fancy that she had a full share in the conversation. When the summer weather rendered walking a martyrdom and driving an affliction, she could recline on her favourite sofa reading a novel, soothed by the feeble twittering of her birds; while Charlotte and Diana went out together, protected by the smart boy in buttons, who was not altogether without human failings, and was apt to linger behind his fair charges, reading the boards before the doors of newsvendors' shops, or looking at the cartoons in Punch exhibited in the stationers' windows.

Mr. Sheldon made a point of pleasing his stepdaughter whenever it was possible for him to do so without palpable inconvenience to himself; and as she was to be gratified by so small a pecuniary sacrifice as the trifling increase of tradesmen's bills caused by Miss Paget's residence in the gothic villa, he was the last man in the world to refuse her that indulgence. His own pursuits were of so absorbing a nature as to leave little leisure for concern about other people's business. He asked no questions about his stepdaughter's companion; but he was not the less surprised to see this beautiful high-bred woman content to sit at his board as an unsalaried dependent.

"Your friend Miss Paget looks like a countess," he said one day to Charlotte. "I thought girls generally pitched upon some plain homely young woman for their pet companion, but you seem to have chosen the handsomest girl in the school."