By the time that arrangements were fully completed, Lord Hexham and the Banneret family had become quite intimate, and in a sense confidential. He had dined with them at the Cecil, where Australian friends were asked to meet him in a quiet way. He was a sociable personage, and the more he saw of his successors at Hexham Hall the more he liked them. Between cultured men of the world there is a certain freemasonry, which deprives social intercourse of all _gêne_ and awkwardness, no matter to what country they belong.
With Mrs. Banneret and her girls his Lordship was much impressed, feeling, as he told her truly, as if he had known them for years. He saw how she sympathised with him; the hard necessity for the eviction—so to speak—of this noble family, after their long and close connection with their ancient home, appealed to her tender heart. Underneath his affectedly frivolous treatment of the subject she divined, with a woman’s intuitive perception, that there was, could not but be, a sore feeling—rising at times to remorse—at the thought that, by his own neglect and indolent mental drift, he had forfeited the heritage of his race. To the family change of circumstances she never referred, but he was aware that it was in her thoughts. In her calm, undemonstrative way she conveyed the idea of regret in the abstract, as inseparable from such an exodus. And in his heart he honoured her for the unspoken sympathy.
When the Earl departed for the United Service Club in London, he wrote, thanking Mrs. Banneret and her husband for their hospitable kindness, and, for which he was even more grateful, their delicate consideration for a ruined man—conscious only too keenly of his own shortcomings and inefficient stewardship.
The merry month of May passed with credit, having provided, for once in a way, appropriate weather, including a decent average of sunshine. The midsummer month arrived in all the glory of that delicious time, of roses and lilies, with all vernal triumphs. And now, in the second week of June—flushed June—came to pass a wondrous equine exhibition, the carnival of coach and harness perfection, unapproachable for form and fashion in any other land under the sun—the meeting of the Four-in-Hand Club! What an ecstasy of excitement and admiration possessed these young people when, at the Magazine in Hyde Park, twenty coaches, utterly perfect in their appointments, lined up.