Of course Welby had shared in the immense effort of the family to comfort and console her.

They had been so eager to accept his help; he had given it with such tact and self-effacement; and now, meanly, they must help Eugenie to dismiss him! For it was becoming too big a thing, this devotion of his, both in Eugenie's life and also in the eyes of the world.

Lord Findon must needs suppose--he did not choose to _know_--that people were talking; and if Eugenie would not free herself from her wretched Albert, she must not provide him--poor child!--with any plausible excuse.
All of which reasoning was strictly according to the canons as Lord Findon understood them; but it did not leave him much the happier.

He was a sensitive, affectionate man, with great natural cleverness, and much natural virtue--wholly unleavened by either thought or discipline.

He did the ordinary things from the ordinary motives; but he suffered when the ordinary things turned out ill, more than another man would have done.