merely wished to put you on your guard about Ernest. He is just the sort of man to whose attentions I should object, for a daughter of my own."
"I forget whether you have any grown-up daughters?" asked Mrs. Douglas, with an innocent air of doubt.
"My dear Mrs. Douglas, I have not been married nine years—or ten at the very utmost."
"In-deed!" There was an emphasis on the first syllable, indicative of profound astonishment.
"And I was quite a child at the time; married literally from the school-room, before," with a half-sigh, "I knew what I was about."
"In-deed!" said Mrs. Douglas, still in a marked state of emphatic surprise. "Well, I am much obliged to you, Lady Portmore, for putting me on my guard about Colonel Beaufort, but these things must take their chance. Perhaps he would not show such a decided preference for Eliza's society if there were anything else to amuse him; but Miss Forrester does not seem inclined to take any notice of him; and Lady Teviot is so surrounded by all the other gentlemen, she has no time to attend to her cousin. So there are only you and I left. Lady Portmore, and apparently he has not the slightest taste for our society." And so saying, Mrs. Douglas, who had been rolling up her strips of canvas, and winding off her ends of worsted, quietly took her basket and walked away, leaving Lady Portmore thoroughly discomfited by the many offensive insinuations conveyed in her closing speech. She was regularly out of sorts, and in that soured state in which the wish to do a little mischief is a consoling idea. She was half inclined to leave St. Mary's, where her vanity felt half starved; but her faith in her power over Lord Teviot remained unshaken, and her wish to try it had become stronger. Besides, she could not go now, there was a great man coming.
