NEXT morning Margaret Fanshawe was unusually silent at breakfast, except to her new friends the squirrels, whose cage she placed on a little table close by, and who had already begun to attach themselves to her. To them she talked, as she gave them their nuts, a great deal of that silvery nonsense which is pleasant to hear as any other pleasant sound in nature. But good old Miss Sheckleton thought her out of spirits.

“She’s vexing herself about my conjectures,” thought the old lady. “I’m sorry I said a word about it. I believe I was a fool, but she’s a greater one. She’s young, however, and has that excuse.”

“How old are you, Margaret?” said she abruptly, after a long silence.

“Twenty-two, my last birth-day,” answered the young lady, and looked, as if expecting a reason for the question.

“Yes; so I thought,” said Miss Sheckleton. “The twenty-third of June — a midsummer birth-day — your poor mamma used to say — the glow and flowers of summer — a brilliant augury.”

“Brilliantly accomplished,” added the girl; “don’t you think so, Frisk, and you, little Comet? Are you not tired of Malory already, my friends? My cage is bigger, but so am I, don’t you see; you’d be happier climbing and hopping among the boughs. What am I to you, compared with liberty? I did not ask for you, little fools, did I? You came to me; and I will open the door of your cage some day, and give you back to the unknown — to chance — from which you came.”

“You’re sad today, my child,” said Miss Sheckleton, laying her hand gently on her shoulder. “Are you vexed at what I said to you last night?”

“What did you say?”

“About these little things — the squirrels.”

“No, darling, I don’t care. Why should I? They come from Fortune, and that little brown boy. They came no more to me than to you,” said the girl carelessly. “Yes, another nut; you shall, you little wonders!”

“Now, that’s just what I was going to say. I might just as well have bought them as you; and I must confess I coloured my guess a little, for I only mentioned poor Whisk in passing, and I really don’t know that he heard me; and I think if he had thought of getting a squirrel for us, he’d have asked leave to send it to me. I could not have objected to that, you know; and that little boy may be ill, you know; or something may have happened to delay him, and he’ll turn up; and you’ll have to make a bargain, and pay a fair price for them yet.”

“Yes, of course; I never thought anything else — eventually; and I knew all along you were jesting. I told these little creatures so this morning, over and over again. If they could speak they would say so. Would not you, you two dear little witches?”

So she carried out her pets with her, and hung their cage among the boughs of the tree that stood by the rustic seat to which she used to take her book.

“Well, I’ve relieved her mind,” thought Miss Sheckleton.

But oddly enough, she found the young lady not sad, but rather cross and fierce all that afternoon — talking more bitterly than ever to her squirrels, about Malory, and with an angry kind of gaiety, of her approaching exile to France.

“It is not always easy to know how to please young ladies,” thought Miss Sheckleton. “They won’t always take the trouble to know their own minds. Poor thing! It is very lonely — very lonesome, to be sure; — and this little temper will blow over.”

So, full of these thoughts, Miss Sheckleton repaired to that mysterious study door within which Sir Booth, dangerous as a caged beast, paced his floor, and stormed and ground his teeth, over — not his own vices, prodigalities, and madness, but the fancied villanies of mankind — glared through his window in his paroxysms, and sent his curses like muttered thunder across the sea over the head of old Pendillion — and then would subside, and write long, rambling, rubbishy letters to his attorneys in London, which it was Miss Sheckleton’s business to enclose and direct, in her feminine hand, to her old friend Miss Ogden, of Bolton Street, Piccadilly, who saw after the due delivery of these missives, and made herself generally useful during the mystery and crisis of the Fanshawe affairs.

Outside the sombre precincts of Malory Margaret Fanshawe would not go. Old Miss Sheckleton had urged her. Perhaps it was a girlish perversity; perhaps she really disliked the idea of again meeting or making an acquaintance. At all events, she was against any more excursions. Thus the days were dull at Malory, and even Miss Sheckleton was weary of her imprisonment.

It is a nice thing to hit the exact point of reserve and difficulty at which an interest of a certain sort is piqued, without danger of being extinguished. Perhaps it is seldom compassed by art, and a fluke generally does it. I am absolutely certain that there was no design here. But there is a spirit of contrariety — a product of pride, of a sensitiveness almost morbid, of a reserve gliding into duplicity, a duplicity without calculation — which yet operates like design. Cleve was piqued — Cleve was angry. The spirit of the chase was roused, as often as he looked at the dusky woods of Malory.

And now he had walked on three successive days past the old gateway, and on each of them, loitered long on the wind-beaten hill that overlooks the grounds of Malory. But in vain. He was no more accustomed to wait than Louis XIV. Now wonder he grew impatient, and meditated the wildest schemes — even that of walking up to the hall-door, and asking to see Sir Booth and Miss Sheckleton, and, if need be, Miss Fanshawe. He only knew that, one way or another, he must see her. He was a young man of exorbitant impatience, and a violent will, and would control events.

There are consequences, of course, and these subjugators are controlled in their turn. Time, as mechanical science shows us, is an element in power; and patience is in durability. God waits, and God is might. And without patience we enter not into the kingdom of God, which is the kingdom of power, and the kingdom of eternity.

Cleve Verney’s romance, next morning, was doomed to a prosaic interruption. He was examining a chart of the Cardyllian estuary, which hangs in the library, trying to account for the boat’s having touched the bank at low water, at a point where he fancied there was a fathom to spare, when the rustic servant entered with —

“Please, sir, a gentleman which his name is Mr. Larkin, is at the door, and wishes to see you, sir, on partickler business, please.”

“Just wait a moment, Edward. Three fathom — two — four feet — by Jove! So it is. We might have been aground for five hours; a shame there isn’t a buoy there — got off in a coach, by Jove! Larkin? Has he no card?”

“Yes, sir, please.”

“Oh! yes — very good. Mr. Larkin — The Lodge. Does he look like a gatekeeper?”

“No, sir, please; quite the gentleman.”

“What the devil can he want of me? Are you certain he did not ask for my uncle?”

“Yes, sir — the Honourable Mr. Verney — which I told him he wasn’t here.”

“And why did not you send him away, then?”

“He asked me if you were here, and wished to see you partickler, sir.”

“Larkin — The Lodge; what is he like — tall or short — old or young?” asked Cleve.

“Tall gentleman, please, sir — not young — helderley, sir, rayther.”

“By Jove! Larkin? I think it is. — Is he bald — a long face, eh?” asked Cleve with sudden interest.

“Yes, sir, a good deal in that way, sir — rayther.”

“Show him in,” said Cleve; “I shall hear all about it, now,” he soliloquised as the man departed. “Yes, the luckiest thing in the world!”

The tall attorney, with the tall bald head and pink eyelids, entered simpering, with hollow jaws, and a stride that was meant to be perfectly easy and gentlemanlike. Mr. Larkin had framed his costume upon something he had once seen upon somebody whom he secretly worshipped as a great authority in quiet elegance. But every article in the attorney’s wardrobe looked always new — a sort of lavender was his favourite tint — a lavender waistcoat, lavender trowsers, lavender gloves — so that, as the tall lank figure came in, a sort of blooming and vernal effect, in spite of his open black frock-coat, seemed to enter and freshen the chamber.

“How d’ye do, Mr. Larkin? My uncle is at present in France. Sit down, pray — can I be of any use?” said Cleve, who now recollected his appearance perfectly, and did not like it.

The attorney, smiling engagingly, more and more, and placing a very smooth new hat upon the table, sat himself down, crossing one long leg over the other, throwing himself languidly back, and letting one of his long arms swing over the back of his chair, so that his fingers almost touched the floor, said —

“Oh?” in a prolonged tone of mild surprise. “They quite misinformed me in town — not at Verney House — I did not allow myself time to call there; but my agents, they assured me that your uncle, the Honourable Kiffyn Fulke Verney, was at present down here at Ware, and a most exquisite retreat it certainly is. My occupations, and I may say my habits, call me a good deal among the residences of our aristocracy,” he continued, with a careless grandeur and a slight wave of his hand, throwing himself a little more back, “and I have seen nothing, I assure you, Mr. Verney, more luxurious and architectural than this patrician house of Ware, with its tasteful colonnade, and pilastered front, and the distant view of the fashionable watering-place of Cardyllian, which also belongs to the family; nothing certainly lends a more dignified charm to the scene, Mr. Verney, than a distant view of family property, where, as in this instance, it is palpably accidental — where it is at all forced, as in the otherwise highly magnificent seat of my friend Sir Thomas Oldbull, baronet; so far from elevating, it pains one, it hurts one’s taste”— and Mr. Jos. Larkin shrugged and winced a little, and shook his head —“Do you know Sir Thomas? —no— I dare say — he’s quite a new man, Sir Thomas — we all look on him in that light in our part of the world — a — in fact, a parvenu,” which word Mr. Larkin pronounced as if it were spelled pair vennew. “But, you know, the British Constitution, every man may go up — we can’t help it — we can’t keep them down. Money is power, Mr. Verney, as the old Earl of Coachhouse once said to me — and so it is; and when they make a lot of it, they come up, and we must only receive them, and make the best of them.”

“Have you had breakfast, Mr. Larkin?” inquired Cleve, in answer to all this.

“Thanks, yes — at Llwynan — a very sweet spot — one of the sweetest, I should say, in this beauteous country.”

“I don’t know — I dare say — I think you wished to see me on business, Mr. Larkin?” said Cleve.

“I must say, Mr. Verney, you will permit me, that I really have been taken a little by surprise. I had expected confidently to find your uncle, the Honourable Kiffyn Fulke Verney, here, ............