but then I am wise enough to know that it is so because my taste is a bad taste."
"I know no man with a more accurate or refined taste in such matters," said Lady Lufton. Beyond this she did not dare to go. She knew very well that her strategy would be vain should her son once learn that she had a strategy. To tell the truth, Lady Lufton was becoming somewhat indifferent to Lucy Robarts. She had been very kind to the little girl, but the little girl seemed hardly to appreciate the kindness as she should do; and then Lord Lufton would talk to Lucy, "which was so unnecessary, you know;" and Lucy had got into a way of talking quite freely with Lord Lufton, having completely dropped that short, spasmodic, ugly exclamation of "my lord."
And so the Christmas festivities were at an end, and January wore itself away. During the greater part of this month Lord Lufton did not remain at Framley, but was nevertheless in the county, hunting with the hounds of both divisions, and staying at various houses. Two or three nights he spent at Chaldicotes, and one—let it only be told in an under voice—at Gatherum Castle! Of this he said nothing to Lady Lufton. "Why make her unhappy?" as he said to Mark. But Lady Lufton knew it, though she said not a word to him—knew it, and was unhappy. "If he would only marry Griselda, there would be an end of that danger," she said to herself.
But now we must go back for a while to the vicar and his little bill. It will be remembered that his first idea with reference to that trouble, after the reading of his father's will, was to borrow the money from his brother John. John was down at Exeter at the time, and was to stay one night at the parsonage on his way to London. Mark would broach the matter to him on the journey, painful though it would be to him to tell the story of his own folly to a brother so much younger than himself, and who had always looked up to him, clergyman and full-blown vicar as he was, with a deference greater than that which such difference in age required.
The story was told, however, but was told all in vain, as Mark found out before he reached Framley. His brother John immediately declared that he would lend him the money, of course—eight hundred if his brother wanted it. He, John, confessed that, as regarded the remaining two,
