Rank and Beauty is a more frothy and less religious variety of the mind-and-millinery species. The heroine, we are told, ‘if she inherited her father’s pride of birth and her mother’s beauty of person, had in herself a tone of enthusiastic feeling that perhaps belongs to her age even in the lowly born, but which is refined into the high spirit of wild romance only in the far descended, who feel that it is their best inheritance’. This enthusiastic young lady, by dint of reading the newspaper to her father, falls in love with the prime minister, who, through the medium of leading articles and ‘the résumé of the debates’, shines upon her imagination as a bright particular star, which has no parallax for her, living in the country as simple Miss Wyndham. But she forthwith becomes Baroness Umfraville in her own right, astonishes the world with her beauty and accomplishments when she bursts upon it from her mansion in Spring Gardens, and, as you foresee, will presently come into contact with the unseen objet aimé. Perhaps the words ‘prime minister’ suggest to you a wrinkled or obese sexagenarian; but pray dismiss the image. Lord Rupert Conway has been ‘called while still almost a youth to the first situation which a subject can hold in the universe’, and even leading articles and a résumé of the debates have not conjured up a dream that surpasses the fact.

The door opened again, and Lord Rupert Conway entered. Evelyn gave one glance. It was enough; she was not disappointed. It seemed as if a picture on which she had long gazed was suddenly instinct with life, and had stepped from its frame before her. His tall figure, the distinguished simplicity of his air – it was a living Vandyke, a cavalier, one of his noble cavalier ancestors, or one to whom her fancy had always likened him, who long of yore had, with an Umfraville, fought the Paynim far beyond sea. Was this reality?

Very little like it, certainly.

By and by, it becomes evident that the ministerial heart is touched. Lady Umfraville is on a visit to the Queen at Windsor, and, –

The last evening of her stay, when they returned from riding, Mr Wyndham took her and a large party to the top of the Keep, to see the view. She was leaning on the battlements, gazing from that ‘stately height’ at the prospect beneath her, when Lord Rupert was by her side. ‘What an unrivalled view!’ exclaimed she.

‘Yes, it would have been wrong to go without having been up here. You are pleased with your visit?’

‘Enchanted! “A Queen to live and die under”, to live and die for!’

‘Ha!’ cried he, with sudden emotion, and with a eureka expression of countenance, as if he had indeed found a heart in unison with his own.