On all sides it was agreed that the case against Lord Maulevrier was black as Erebus; and still Lady Maulevrier looked society in the face with an unshaken courage, and was ready with smiles and gracious words for all comers.
But now came a harder trial, which was to receive the man who had disgraced her, lowered her pride to the dust, degraded the name she bore.

She had married him, not loving him--nay, plucking another love out of her heart in order that she might give herself to him.

She had married him for position and fortune; and now by his follies, by his extravagance, and by that greed of gold which is inevitable in the spendthrift and profligate, he had gone near to cheat her out of both name and fortune.

Yet she so commanded herself as to receive him with a friendly air when he arrived at the Dolphin, on a dull grey autumn afternoon, after she had waited for him nearly a fortnight.
James Steadman ushered in his lordship, a frail attenuated looking figure, of middle height, wrapped in a furred cloak, yet shivering, a pale sickly face, light auburn whiskers, light blue eyes, full and large, but with no intellectual power in them.

Lady Maulevrier was sitting by the fire, in a melancholy attitude, with the Blenheim spaniel on her lap.