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“Did I say there was a girl with a wonderful voice, my dear? I forget.”

“Not you, but Augusta; don’t you remember, Aunt Caroline, a girl in the Cloisters, in—in the Lodges, a Miss—I don’t remember the name. Lottie something, Augusta called her.”

“Ah! Augusta was too ready to make friends. It is Miss Despard, I suppose.”

“Well; might we not have Miss Despard here some evening? If her voice is as fine as Augusta said, it might be the making of me, Aunt Caroline. An English prima donna would make all our fortunes. And unless I hear her, it is not possible, is it, I appeal to your candour, that I can judge?”

“But, my dear!” “But” was a word which scarcely existed in Lady Caroline’s vocabulary. It meant an objection, and she rarely objected to anything. Still there was a limit to which instinct and experience alike bound her. She was not unkind by nature, but rather the reverse, and if there was anything that approached a passion—nay, not a passion, an emotion—in her nature, it was for the poor. She who was little moved by any relationship, even the closest, almost loved the poor, and would take trouble for them, petting them when they were sick, and pleased to hear of all their affairs when they were well—conscience and inclination supplementing each other in this point. But the poor, the real “poor,” they who are so kind as to be destitute now and then, with nothing to eat and all their clothes at the pawnbroker’s, and their existence dependent upon the clergyman’s nod, or the visit of the district lady—these were very different from the Chevaliers in their Lodges. There even Lady Caroline drew the line. She did what was suggested to her in a great many cases, but here she felt that she could make a stand when necessity required. Not the people in the Lodges! people who though they lived in small houses on small incomes considered themselves to be ladies and gentlemen as good as the Royal Family themselves. The very mildest, the very gentlest, must pause somewhere, and this is where Lady Caroline made her stand. “My dear,” she said, something like a flush coming to her sallow cheek, for Jeremie by this time had brought the lamps and lighted the candles and made her visible; “I have never visited the people in the Lodges. I have always made a stand there. There was one of them appointed through my brother Courtland, you know—your papa, my dear—but when Beatrice asked me to notice them I was obliged to decline. I really could not do it. I hope I never shrink from doing my duty to the poor; but these sort of people—you must really excuse me, Rollo; I could not, I do not think I could do it.”