ly they had heard of
Pemberton the distinguished landscape painter, and they had been told
that he had married into the peerage, as Aunt Penny had married into the
county. The girls also remembered perfectly the quiet-looking young
couple who had been noticed walking about with Tom Robinson the July
before last. People had wondered languidly who the strangers could
be--whether they were cousins far removed on Tom's father's side of the
house, since they did not quite answer to the style of his mother's
yeomen kindred. But it was an effort to the provincial mind to identify
the unobtrusive-looking pair with the Pembertons, to realize that Mr.
Pemberton and his Lady Mary had actually come and stayed the better part
of a week with Tom Robinson. They could hardly have been ignorant of
"Robinson's," whose master was only received into the upper-class houses
of the town on a species of sufferance.

The peerage must have unique rules by which to frame its standards.
There was the Hon. Victoria, Mrs. Carey's niece by marriage, who, when
Carey's Bank was in full bloom, would hardly be seen in the streets of
Redcross, and scarcely deigned to acknowledge her own aunt-in-law. As to
the familiarity of staying a night in the Bank House, she would never
have dreamt of it. In this respect she did little credit to the teaching
of her old governess, Miss Franklin, who had shown herself a philosopher
in her own person. Perhaps, when it came to stooping at all, the peerage
felt it might as soon, and with a still more gracious and graceful
effect, bend low as bend slightly. Perhaps in the peerage, as in every
other class, there are all sorts and conditions of mind and heart.

A little clue might have been supplied to account for the eccentricity
of the Pembertons, and to lessen the shock of their conduct to the
Millars, if the latter had been made acquainted with one circumstance.
About the time of the stay of the artist and his wife in Rome, where he
had been only too glad to run up against a favourite old college chum,
when the three had been making a long excursion in company beyond the
Campagna, Pemberton had been suddenly attacked in a remote little town
with a violent illness.

His poor young wife would have been utterly frightened and forlorn had
it not been for the moral courage and untiring good offices of the third
person in the company--Tom Robinson.

Tom did not appear conscious of the sensation he had created by the
mention