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As years had rolled by the memory of what had really occurred in Applethwaite Church had become indistinct; and, though the reader knows that that marriage was capable of easy proof, that there would have been but little difficulty had the only difficulty consisted in proving that, the young heir and the distant Lovels were not assured of it.
The inhabitants of the Yoxham rectory, who were well born, ladies and gentlemen without a stain, who were hitherto free from all base intermarriages, and had nothing among their male cousins below soldiers and sailors, parsons and lawyers, who had successfully opposed an intended marriage between a cousin in the third degree and an attorney because the alliance was below the level of the Lovels, were peculiarly averse to any intermingling of ranks.
Did not Minnie go with you?" "No," said the Earl. "She went in some other direction at my bidding. Mr. Cross is with her, I suppose." It was evident from the tone of his voice that the displeasure of the head of all the Lovels was very great. "We start soon, I suppose?" said Lady Anna. "After lunch, my dear; it is hardly one yet." "I will go up all the same, and see about my things."
He had dreams of distributing the greater part among the Lovels and the Countess, and taking himself and his wife with one-third of it to some new country in which they would not in derision call his wife the Lady Anna, and in which he would be as good a man as any earl. But let all that be as it might, the girl was to keep her secret till the thing should be settled.
Two or three old men, of equal rank with his own, men who had been his father's friends and were allied to the Lovels, and had been taken into confidence by Sir William, told him that the proper way out of the difficulty had been suggested to him. There could be nothing, they said, more fitting than that two cousins so situated should marry.
To her thinking, it was no sin in him that he should want her wealth, he, the Earl, to whom by right the wealth of the Lovels should belong. The sin was rather hers, in that she kept it from him.
They stopped presently before a low wooden gate, and looking out of the window of the fly, Miss Lovel saw a cottage which she remembered as a dreary uninhabited place, always to let; a cottage with a weedy garden, and a luxuriant growth of monthly roses and honeysuckle covering it from basement to roof; not a bad sort of place for a person of small means and pretensions, but O, what a descent from the ancient splendour of Arden Court! that Arden which had belonged to the Lovels ever since the land on which it stood was given to Sir Warren Wyndham Lovel, knight, by his gracious master King Edward IV., in acknowledgment of that warrior's services in the great struggle between Lancaster and York.
To give the rector of Yoxham his due it must be said of him that he would have done his very best for the head of his family had there been no large fortune within the young lord's grasp. The Lovels had ever been true to the Lovels, with the exception of that late wretched Earl, the Lady Anna's father.
"I don't think it matters much about a man being handsome, but he is beautiful. Not dark, like all the other Lovels; nor yet what you call fair. I don't think that fair men ever look manly." "Oh no," said Alice, who was contemplating an engagement with a black-haired young barrister.
But I do love her; and it is because I love her that I would fain see her removed from the reproaches which her own madness will bring upon her. Let her die; if it be God's will. I can follow her without one wish for a prolonged life. Then will a noble family be again established, and her sorrowful tale will be told among the Lovels with a tear and without a curse."
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