'Why are all your remarks on that girl so dashed with vinegar—decided Chili?' asked Jerry.
'She gives herself airs far above her station in life.'
'Tush; we are all descended from Adam and Eve—a gardener and his wife.'
'You will never convince me that there is not good and bad blood in this world,' exclaimed Lady Wilmot.
'Bravo, mater—cast the scheme of creation anew! What are the odds so long as we are happy. But I think the time has now come when you should know the influence this young lady's father may have in our affairs.'
Jerry now put before his horrified mother—horrified to hear of their necessity—the matter of the mortgages, and the full extent of these, and urged that she should show Bella some more marked attention, and less hauteur or supercilious indifference, and have her more often at the mansion house, to the guests at which she—a handsome girl, full of natural gaiety, and with a decided turn for charades, tableaux-vivants, private theatricals, lawn tennis, and games of all kinds—would prove invaluable.
But Lady Wilmot heard him in silence, with a knit of her pencilled eyebrows and a droop in the corners of her handsome mouth. She could only think of these horrible mortgages, and the awful humiliation of half the estate being in the hands of Mr. Chevenix.
'The estate seems to be quite slipping from me,' said Jerry, after a gloomy pause.
'Slipping?'
'Yes, it is guineas to gooseberries that the rest will follow Langley Park and so forth.'