The uncharitable described the match as one in which one party had the power to refuse, but would not, and the other had the power, but could not. Lord Brookstone had lastly married, it seemed, for the sole purpose of disobliging his family. Lord Brookstone’s issue by his previous ladies regarded each other with at least the veneer of civility, and had, as a sure inducement to familial accord, the existence of such an objectionable step-mother to unite them in some feeling of family connection. Lord Brookstone lived only a few years after his last marriage. When the will was read, he had left everything legally possible away from his heirs and his title to his last wife. Any morsel that had not been entailed by marriage articles upon the children of the various mothers was now the property of a woman of neither birth nor beauty, charm nor wit. Lord Brookstone had, for reasons of enchantment—or feebleness of mind—been persuaded by this lady to give her a life-estate on any property which was not actually in the possession of his own children! His only daughter had been left with nothing other than a small settlement that had been in her mother’s gift. Elizabeth, looking at Lady Brookstone, was wholly unable to account for such an history. The disgust of Lord Brookstone’s sons and daughter, when forced into the company of their odious step-mother, could be only partially imagined by those not subject to the daily diminution of comforts, owing to the enrichment of a woman who had no claim to fortune other than that she had seduced a man no longer in possession of his faculties to take her as a wife. The lady now passed her days in the company of a coterie of single-men of all ages, united—as it appeared—only in their fawning attention to Lady Brookstone and a singular disinclination to matrimony. These men gathered about her like moths to a light, which Elizabeth initially found unaccountable. Elizabeth later learnt of a rumour that Lord Brookstone had included a reversion in his will should his relict remarry, which might well explain Her Ladyship’s preference of company.