Marsham gave a gloomy smile.
"I shall be a pauper, of course--that was made quite plain to me."
"No, no!--that must be prevented!" said Ferrier, with energy.
Marsham was not quick to reply. His manner as he stood with his back to the fire, his distinguished head well thrown back on his straight, lean shoulders, was the manner of a proud man suffering humiliation. He was thirty-six, and rapidly becoming a politician of importance. Yet here he was--poor and impotent, in the midst of great wealth, wholly dependent, by his father's monstrous will, on his mother's caprice--liable to be thwarted and commanded, as though he were a boy of fifteen. Up till now Lady Lucy's yoke had been tolerable; to-day it galled beyond endurance.
Moreover, there was something peculiarly irritating at the moment in Ferrier's intervention. There had been increased Parliamentary friction of late between the two men, in spite of the intimacy of their personal relations. To be forced to owe fortune, career, and the permission to marry as he pleased to Ferrier's influence with his mother was, at this juncture, a bitter pill for Oliver Marsham.
Ferrier understood him perfectly, and he had never displayed more kindness or more tact than in the conversation which passed between them. Marsham finally agreed that Diana must be frankly informed of his mother's state of mind, and that a waiting policy offered the only hope. On this they were retiring to the front drawing-room when Lady Lucy opened the communicating door.
"A letter for you, Oliver."
He took it, and turned it over. The handwriting was unknown to him.
"Who brought this?" he asked of the butler standing behind his mother.
"A servant, sir, from Beechcote Manor, He was told to wait for an answer."