, who had not been consulted, made a pretence of interviewing
the Misses de Crespigny, by whom this aristocratic preserve was
safeguarded.

He had listened to Miss Selina de Crespigny's eloquent exposition of the
system adopted at De Crespigny House. Then he had torn it all to pieces
as one might the delicate fabric of a spider's web, constructed at
infinite cost.

"And, tell me now, do you teach them to be good daughters and wives and
mothers?" he asked, with his air of convincing simplicity. "Do you teach
them their duties to their husbands and children, ma'am, may I ask?"

Miss de Crespigny positively gasped. There was an indelicacy about the
General's speech, to her manner of thinking.

"We expect our young ladies' mothers to teach them all that," she said,
stiffly.

"And they don't. In nine cases out of ten they don't. They've too much
to do otherwise. Whether it is philanthropy or politics, or just amusing
themselves, they've all got too much to do," Sir Denis said, with a
simple air that made it doubtful if this criticism of Society's ways was
adverse or not.

Nelly did not go to De Crespigny House. She went, instead, to a much
less pretentious school, kept by a family of four sisters, for whom the
dry bones of teaching had been clothed with life. The house was perched
on a high, windy cliff. The sisters, Miss Stella and Miss Clara, Miss
Lucy and Miss Marianne, did their own teaching, and did it in a
perfectly unconventional way to the twenty or so girls who made up their
school.

When Nelly came home to her father at seventeen years of age, it would
not have been easy to find a fresher, franker specimen of young
girlhood. In fact, to her father's eyes she was somewhat alarmingly
bright and fair.

"The young fellows will be about her thick as bees," he said to himself
in a frightened way. "I won't have any nonsense about Nelly. I want my
girl to myself for a little while. Afterwards there is that arrangement
of the Dowager's about Nelly and Robin. I don't care for the marriage of
first cousins. And I'm not sure that I care for Robin; still, he is poor
Gerald's son. There can be nothing against poor Gerald's son."

He was so afraid of possible lovers for Nelly that he actually suggested
to her that she should go to a smart finishing school for the couple of
years that separated him from the sixty-five limit.

"After that," he said, faintheartedly, for there was a sparkle in
Nelly's eye which discourag