Marchioness, my dear, whose
means, as you doubtless are aware, greatly exceed my own. The garnets
are from me. I hope they may both be worn long and happily."

I hardly know which was the worst, the lecture, the kiss, or the
present. The latter she would have declined, had it been possible;
but it was not possible. When she had agreed to be married at
Matching she had not calculated the amount of punishment which would
thereby be inflicted on her. But I think that, though she bore it
impatiently, she was aware that she had deserved it. Although she
fretted herself greatly under the infliction of Lady Midlothian, she
acknowledged to herself, even at the time, that she deserved all
the lashes she received. She had made a fool of herself in her vain
attempt to be greater and grander than other girls, and it was only
fair that her folly should be in some sort punished before it was
fully pardoned. John Grey punished it after one fashion; by declining
to allude to it, or to think of it, or to take any account of it. And
now Lady Midlothian had punished it after another fashion, and Alice
went out of the Countess's presence with sundry inward exclamations
of "mea culpa," and with many unseen beatings of the breast.

Two days before the ceremony came the Marchioness and her august
daughter. Her Lady Jane was much more august than the other Lady
Jane;--very much more august indeed. She had very long flaxen hair,
and very light blue eyes, which she did not move frequently, and she
spoke very little,--one may almost say not at all, and she never
seemed to do anything. But she was very august, and was, as all the
world knew, engaged to marry the Duke of Dumfriesshire, who, though
twice her own age, was as yet childless, as soon as he should have
completed his mourning for his first wife. Kate told her cousin that
she did not at all know how she should ever stand up as one in a
group with so august a person as this Lady Jane, and Alice herself
felt that such an attendant would quite obliterate her. But Lady Jane
and her mother were both harmless. The Marchioness never spoke to
Kate and hardly spoke to Alice, and the Marchioness's Lady Jane was
quite as silent as her mother.

On the morning of this day,--the day on which these very august
people came,--a telegram arrived at the Priory calling for Mr
Palliser's immediate presence in London. He came to Alice full of
regret, and behaved himself very nicely. Alice now regarded him qu