if
incoherent love, he seemed to Lady Bridget-Mary's family tolerable, almost
desirable, nearly quite the thing....

"He has boiled jam into sweetness for the whole civilised world," said the
most influential and awful of Lord Castleclare's seven sisters, a
Dowager-Duchess who was Lady-in-Waiting, and exhaled the choicest essence
of the Middle Victorian era. She still adhered to the mushroom-shaped
straw hats of her youth, trimmed with black velvet rosettes, in the centre
of each of which reposed a cut jet button. She went always voluminously
clad in black or shot-silk gowns, their skirts so swelled out by a
multiplicity of starched cambric petticoats, adorned with tambour-work,
that she was credited with the existence of a crinoline. She had, in
marrying her now defunct Scots Duke, embraced Presbyterianism, and though
her brother believed her, as far as the next world was concerned, to be
lost beyond redemption, he entertained for her judgment in the matters of
this planet a great esteem.

"He has boiled jam enough to spread over the surface of the civilised
globe, and now proposes to hive its concentrated extract for the benefit
of our dearest girl, in the shape of a settlement that a Princess of the
Blood might envy. I call the whole thing pretty," pronounced the Dowager,
"almost romantic, or it might be made to sound so if a person of superior
intelligence and tact would undertake to plead for the young man. His
terrible title has quite escaped me. Lord Plumbanks? Thank you! It might
have been Strawberrybeds, and that would have increased our difficulty. No
time should be lost. Therefore, as you, dear Castleclare, with your wife
and the boy, who, I am gratified to hear, has cut another, are going to
Rome for Holy Week, perhaps you would wish me in your absence to break the
ice with Bridget-Mary?"

Lord Castleclare's long, solemn face and arched, lugubrious eyebrows bore
no little resemblance to the well-known portrait of the conscientious but
unlucky Stuart in whose service his ancestor had shed blood and money,
receiving in lieu of both, a great many Royal promises, the Eastern carpet
that had belonged to the monarch's Irish oratory, and the fine sard
intaglio, brilliant-set, and representing a Calvary, that loyal servant's
descendant wore upon his thin ivory middle finger. He twiddled the ring
nervously as he said:

"She has gone into Lenten Retreat at a Convent in Kensington. I--arah!--I
do not think it