Nearly three months after the receipt of the letter inserted in the preceding chapter, Lady Glenfeld wrote thus to her sister, then at Paris:

‘Our friends are arrived, dear Isabel, and Agnes is actually under my roof. Lord Glenfeld, with his wonted indulgence, consented to accompany me to town to receive her. She gives an excellent account of you, and says you are not only perfectly well, but in the highest / beauty, and in eminent favour with all your new relations. Of Monsieur de Verneuil, she adds, that he improved upon her every hour, and that he is one of the most honourable and at the same time, agreeable men, she knows. Think you, dearest Isabel, I heard all this with indifference? Ah, no: – my delight at it was as sincere, as my felicitations are cordial. I have only to wish, that you may ere long, give me the additional joy of seeing you in England.

‘Mr. St. Hubert and Walsingham are at an hotel, near us, but merely to sleep and dress. They spend the chief part of their time, as you may well imagine, with us. It is truly gratifying to see Walsingham's frank and manly countenance beaming with an expression of such enviable happiness. I have, in former times, often known him gay, but his merriment was too apt to be followed by fits of abstraction and seriousness which proved that all within was not at ease. The fact is, his mother's inexplicable / coldness and neglect, affected him deeply even from his boyhood; and I remember to have heard him more than once assert, that it was to be feared the man who possessed not the qualities that could endear him to his own mother, was born to pass through life unloved by any other woman! Such an impression could not but furnish food to great dejection, relieved at intervals, however, (happily for him), by the buoyant spirits natural to his time of life and original disposition.