or itch for them; and Senorita da Cordova told herself rather
petulantly that Lady Maud would rather starve than be the most
successful soprano that ever trilled on the high A till the house
yelled with delight, and the royalties held up their stalking-glasses
to watch the fluttering of her throat, if perchance they might see how
the pretty noise was made.

But at this point Margaret Donne was a little ashamed of herself, and
went to bed; and she dreamt that Edmund Lushington had suddenly taken
to wearing a little moustache, very much turned up and flattened on
his cheeks, and a single emerald for a stud, which cast a greenish
refulgence round it upon a shirt-front that was hideously shiny;
and the effect of these changes in his appearance was to make him
perfectly odious.

CHAPTER VIII

Lord Creedmore had begun life as a poor barrister, with no particular
prospects, had entered the House of Commons early, and had been a
hard-working member of Parliament till he had inherited a title and a
relatively exiguous fortune when he was over fifty by the unexpected
death of his uncle and both the latter's sons within a year. He had
married young; his wife was the daughter of a Yorkshire country
gentleman, and had blessed him with ten children, who were all alive,
and of whom Lady Maud was not the youngest. He was always obliged to
make a little calculation to remember how old she was, and whether
she was the eighth or the ninth. There were three sons and seven
daughters. The sons were all in the army, and all stood between
six and seven feet in their stockings; the daughters were all
good-looking, but none was as handsome as Maud; they were all married,
and all but she had children. Lady Creedmore had been a beauty too,
but at the present time she was stout and gouty, had a bad temper, and
alternately soothed and irritated her complaint and her disposition by
following cures or committing imprudences. Her husband, who was now
over sixty, had never been ill a day in his life; he was as lean and
tough as a greyhound and as active as a schoolboy, a good rider, and a
crack shot.

His connection with this tale, apart from the friendship which grew
up between Margaret and Lady Maud, lies in the fact that his land
in Derbyshire adjoined the estate which Mr. Van Torp had bought and
re-named after himself. It was here that Lady Maud and the American
magnate had first met, two years after her marriage, when she had come
ho