ted, 'Send them to school;' so it was absolutely
necessary to approach him in another manner, and I flatter myself I was
equal to the occasion."

All this took place some six or seven years before the commencement of
our story; and the result had fully warranted Lady Mary's machinations,
as she had successfully married off her two elder daughters, and, as
she had occasionally told her intimates, her chief object in life now
was to see Blanche, the younger, suitably provided for. Lady Mary was
in her way a stanch and devoted mother. Her duty towards her
daughters, she considered, terminated when she had once seen them
properly married. She had two sons--one in a dragoon regiment, and the
younger in the Foreign Office--and she never neglected to cajole or
flatter any one who, she thought, might in any way be capable of
advancing their interests.

The Bloxams had come down from town to entertain a few friends during
the Easter holidays at Todborough, and Lady Mary was now sitting in the
oriel window of the morning-room engaged in an animated _tete-a-tete_
with one of her most intimate friends, Mr. Pansey Cottrell. Mr. Pansey
Cottrell had been a man about town for the last thirty years, mixing
freely everywhere in the very best society. It must have been a pure
matter of whim if Pansey Cottrell ever paid for his own dinner during a
London season--or, for the matter of that, even out of it--as he had
only to name the week that suited him to be a welcome guest at scores
of country houses. Nothing would have been more difficult than to
explain why it was that Pansey Cottrell should be as essential to a
fashionable dinner party as the epergne. Nothing more puzzling to
account for than why his volunteering his presence in a country house
should be always deemed a source of gratulation to the hostess. He was
a man of no particular birth and no particular conversational powers;
and unless due to his being thoroughly _au courant_ with all the very
latest gossip of the London world, his success can only be put down as
past understanding. Neophytes who did not know Pansey Cottrell, when
they met him in a country house, would gaze with awe-struck curiosity
at the sheaf of correspondence awaiting him on the side-table, and
wondered what news he would unfold to them that morning. But the more
experienced knew better. Pansey Cottrell always came down late, and
never talked at breakfast. He kept his budget of scandal invariab