turally anxious to
enjoy as exclusively as possible the company of her son the first day of
his return from so long an absence, Lady Erpingham had asked no one
to meet him. The earl's heavy travelling-carriage at length rolled
clattering up the court-yard; and in a few minutes a tall man, in the
prime of life, and borrowing some favourable effect as to person from
the large cloak of velvet and furs which hung round him, entered the
room, and Lady Erpingham embraced her son. The kind and familiar manner
with which he answered her inquiries and congratulations was somewhat
changed when he suddenly perceived Constance. Lord Erpingham was a cold
man, and, like most cold men, ashamed of the evidence of affection. He
greeted Constance very quietly; and, as she thought, slightly: but his
eyes turned to her far more often than any friend of Lord Erpingham's
might ever have remarked those large round hazel eyes turn to any one
before.

When the earl withdrew to adjust his toilet for dinner, Lady Erpingham,
as she wiped her eyes, could not help exclaiming to Constance, "Is he
not handsome? What a figure!"

Constance was a little addicted to flattery where she liked the one who
was to be flattered, and she assented readily enough to the maternal
remark. Hitherto, however, she had not observed anything more in Lord
Erpingham than his height and his cloak: as he re-entered and led her to
the dining-room she took a better, though still but a casual, survey.

Lord Erpingham was that sort of person of whom _men_ always say, "What
a prodigiously fine fellow!" He was above six feet high, stout in
proportion: not, indeed, accurately formed, nor graceful in bearing,
but quite as much so as a man of six feet high need be. He had a manly
complexion of brown, yellow, and red. His whiskers were exceedingly
large, black, and well arranged. His eyes, as I have before said, were
round, large, and hazel; they were also unmeaning. His teeth were good;
and his nose, neither aquiline nor Grecian, was yet a very showy nose
upon the whole. All the maidservants admired him; and you felt, in
looking at him, that it was a pity our army should lose so good a
grenadier.

Lord Erpingham was a Whig of the old school: he thought the Tory
boroughs ought to be thrown open. He was generally considered a sensible
man. He had read Blackstone, Montesquieu, Cowper's Poems, and _The
Rambler_; and he was always heard with great attention in the House of
Lords. In