“She doesn’t mind me, papa,” Theodora answered. “Do say something to her, mama.”

“It’s not my business to reform other people’s children,” lady Ann returned.

“I find her exceedingly original!” remarked the baronet.

“That is her charm,” responded Arthur, “but it is a dangerous one.”

“Miss Wylder, with all her sweetness,” said Miss Malliver, “has no idea of social distinction. She cannot understand why she should not talk to any farmer’s son or dairymaid she happens to meet. She is so familiar with them.”

“Yesterday I found her talking to the bookbinder as familiarly as if he had been Arthur,” said Theodora.

“She lacks self-respect,” said lady Ann. “But we must deal with her gently, and try to do her good.”

Lady Ann was an unfaltering church-goer, rigidly decorous in rendering what she imagined God, and knew the clergyman expected, while remaining as rank a mammon-worshipper as any in the land.

“But I so far agree with sir Wilton,” she went on, “as to grant that her manners have in them the germ of possible distinction. And I think they will come to be all, or nearly all, that could be desired. We ought at least to give her the advantage of any doubt, and do what we can to lead her in the right direction.”

“It’s a fine thing to go to church and have your wits sharpened!” said the baronet, with an ungenial laugh.

Sir Wilton regarded lady Ann as the coldest-blooded and most selfish woman in creation, and certainly she was not less selfish and was colder-blooded than he. Full of his own importance as any Pharisee—as full as he could be without making himself ridiculous, he resented the slight regard she showed to that importance. He believed himself wise in human nature, when in truth he was only quick to read in another what lay within the limited range of his own consciousness. Of the noble in humanity he knew next to nothing. To him all men were only selfish. The cause, though by no means the logical ground of this his belief, was his own ingrained selfishness. With his hazy yet keen cold eye, he was quick to see in another, and prompt to lay to his charge, the faults he pardoned in himself. He had some power over himself, for he very seldom went into a rage, but he kept his temper like a devil, and was coldly cruel. His wife had tamed him a good deal, without in the least reforming him.

He knew that lady Ann’s geniality toward Barbara Wylder had only in mind the girl’s dowry. He smiled with a secret satisfaction, enjoying the imagined discomfort an unexpected turn of events might bring to his wife and her hopes for Arthur.

Lady Ann, of course, knew well enough the secret of sir Wilton’s firstborn, son of a lowborn daughter of a common workman. The infant had not been seen since being stolen from Mortgrange a brief year after his birth.

The baronet had seen his son only once, in the arms of the nurse. A monster it was—indescribably ugly, with webbed fingers and toes. After sir Wilton’s marriage to lady Ann, when he brought his new wife home, the little amphibian was spirited away, by the nurse it was assumed, who also disappeared. No real efforts to locate him were ever made.