whom they knew, and they never decided upon anything out of the limited
circle of their immediate experience without consulting him. Lord
Eskdale had been the cause of their son going to Eton; Lord Eskdale had
recommended them to send him to Christ-church. The duke had begged his
cousin to be his trustee when he married; he had made him his executor,
and had intended him as the guardian of his son. Although, from the
difference of their habits, little thrown together in their earlier
youth, Lord Eskdale had shown, even then, kind consideration for his
relative; he had even proposed that they should travel together, but
the old duke would not consent to this. After his death, however, being
neighbours as well as relatives, Lord Eskdale had become the natural
friend and counsellor of his Grace.

The duke deservedly reposed in him implicit confidence, and entertained
an almost unbounded admiration of his cousin's knowledge of mankind. He
was scarcely less a favourite or less an oracle with the duchess, though
there were subjects on which she feared Lord Eskdale did not entertain
views as serious as her own; but Lord Eskdale, with an extreme
carelessness of manner, and an apparent negligence of the minor arts
of pleasing, was a consummate master of the feminine idiosyncrasy, and,
from a French actress to an English duchess, was skilled in guiding
women without ever letting the curb be felt. Scarcely a week elapsed,
when Lord Eskdale was in the country, that a long letter of difficulties
was not received by him from Montacute, with an earnest request for his
immediate advice. His lordship, singularly averse to letter writing, and
especially to long letter writing, used generally in reply to say that,
in the course of a day or two, he should be in their part of the world,
and would talk the matter over with them.

And, indeed, nothing was more amusing than to see Lord Eskdale,
imperturbable, yet not heedless, with his peculiar calmness, something
between that of a Turkish pasha and an English jockey, standing up
with his back to the fire and his hands in his pockets, and hearing the
united statement of a case by the Duke and Duchess of Bellamont;
the serious yet quiet and unexaggerated narrative of his Grace, the
impassioned interruptions, decided opinions, and lively expressions
of his wife, when she felt the duke was not doing justice to the
circumstances, or her view of them, and the Spartan brevity with which,
when both