He blamed Mrs.Colwood--Diana ought to have been more cautiously guided.

The thought of all the tender preparation made for the girl was both amusing and repellent.
Miss Merton, he understood, was Diana's cousin on the mother's side--the daughter of her mother's sister.

A swarm of questions suddenly arose in his mind--questions not hitherto entertained.

Had there been, in fact, a _mesalliance_--some disagreeable story--which accounted, perhaps, for the self-banishment of Mr.Mallory ?--the seclusion in which Diana had been brought up?
The idea was most unwelcome, but the sight of Fanny Merton had inevitably provoked it.

And it led on to a good many other ideas and speculations of a mingled sort connected, now with Diana, now with recollections, pleasant and unpleasant, of the eight or ten years which had preceded his first sight of her.
For Oliver Marsham was now thirty-six, and he had not reached that age without at least one serious attempt--quite apart from any passages with Alicia Drake--to provide himself with a wife.