ain in
catching her chief lady's eye after, and most of all from her husband's
scowls and subsequent growls and their consequence, for Ursula broke
out, 'It is not fair to blame my mother. How should she have all the
savoir-faire, or what you may call it, of Aunt Jane, when she has had
no practice?'

'Perhaps, Mrs. Egremont,' he retorted with extreme suavity, 'you will
also attend to your daughter's manners.' Otherwise he took little
notice of Ursula, viewing her perhaps, as did the neighbourhood, as a
poor imitation of May, without her style, or it may be with a sense
that her tongue might become inconvenient if not repressed. When he
began to collect sporting guests of his own calibre in the shooting
season, the Canoness quietly advised her sister-in-law to regard them
as gentlemen's parties, and send Ursula down to spend the evening with
her cousins; and to this no objection was made. Mr. Egremont wanted
his beautiful wife at the head of his table, and his guests never
comported themselves unsuitably before her; but nobody wanted the
unformed girl, and she and Blanche were always happy together.

The chief restraint was when Mark was at home, and that was not always.
He made sundry visits and expeditions, and was altogether in an
uncomfortable condition of reaction and perplexity as to his future.
He was a good and conscientious fellow, and had never been actually
idle, but had taken education and life with the easiness of the
prospective heir to a large property; and though he had acquitted
himself creditably, it was with no view of making his powers
marketable. Though he had been entered at the Temple, it was chiefly
in order to occupy himself respectably, and to have a nominal
profession, so as not to be wholly dependent on his uncle; and all that
he had acquired was the conviction that it would be half a lifetime, if
not a whole one, before the law would afford him a maintenance.

His father wished him to take Holy Orders with a view to the reversion
of the Rectory, but Mark's estimate of clerical duty and vocation was
just such as to make him shrink from them. He was three-and-twenty, an
awkward age for all those examinations that stand as lions in the face
of youth intended for almost any sort of service, and seldom or never
to be gagged by interest. For one indeed, he went up and failed, and
in such a manner as to convince him that cramming had more to do than
general culture with success.

He had