"Isn't a duke the greatest after the Queen and the Princes and the Princesses, May?"
"And he has a right to be presented to the Court, and know the Queen; and maybe now and then she asks a duke or two to dine with her, and advise her what to do about Parliament and Radicals and foreign possessions, and so on?"
"It is wonderful to think of it! Wonderful to think of it! To think that the young man we knew in this humble little house as Charlie will be sitting down to gold services with the Queen, and that we shall see his name in _The Court Circular_--'The Duke of Shropshire visited the Queen yesterday, and afterwards enjoyed the honour of dining with Her Majesty.' Wonderful!"
From the lids of the girl's eyes the tears now began to fall. The old Duke had been drowned, the present Duke was dying, and her Charlie, her own, her only darling Charlie, was to be the new Duke. And they should read all those dreadful things in _The Court Circular_ and elsewhere; and she should scarcely be able to take up any kind of a paper in which she should not find his name; but it was plain to her she had lost himself. She, the sweetheart, the wife of a great duke!--she blushed crimson with shame at the bare thought, and she wept for sorrow that a dukedom should rob her of her dear lover.
The elder woman's thoughts went on in quite a different way.
She had, of course, often seen lords and ladies in the Park and the theatres and other places of public assembly, but she had never spoken to one. Her father had, of course, spoken to many, and had been presented at Court; but then her father was to her a god apart, quite as much apart as the members of the peerage. She had, as far as she could now recollect, never seen a duke, except the Duke of Wellington. But then he wasn't a great duke to her mind. He was a great captain, a great soldier, but the ducal quality in him was too new to be interesting. It was overborne by the splendour of his achievements and the glory of his renown. The dukedom was no more in him than the scarf he had put on that morning. But a duke proper, from her point of view, she had never seen; one of whose house there had been dukes three hundred years ago had never come within her ken, and of such dukes she stood in awe, not knowing what manner of men they might be. She had heard of the Dukeries as of some mysterious region, upon which nothing earthly could compel her to enter. She had, of course, seen royal dukes; but these she looked upon as only princes of the blood masquerading.