Ernest.

'It may,' he said. 'Business! Richie.'

He set to counting the promises of votes, disdaining fears and
reflections. Concerts, cricket-matches, Balls, dinner-parties, and the
round of the canvass, and speech-making at our gatherings, occupied every
minute of my time, except on Saturday evenings, when I rode over to
Riversley with Temple to spend the Sunday. Temple, always willing to play
second to me, and a trifle melancholy under his partial eclipse-which,
perhaps, suggested the loss of Janet to him--would have it that this
election was one of the realizations of our boyish dreams of greatness.
The ladies were working rosettes for me. My aunt Dorothy talked very
anxiously about the day appointed by my father to repay the large sum
expended. All hung upon that day, she said, speaking from her knowledge
of the squire. She was moved to an extreme distress by the subject.

'He is confident, Harry; but where can he obtain the money? If your
grandfather sees it invested in your name in Government securities, he
will be satisfied, not otherwise: nothing less will satisfy him; and if
that is not done, he will join you and your father together in his mind;
and as he has hitherto treated one he will treat both. I know him. He is
just, to the extent of his vision; but he will not be able to separate
you. He is aware that your father has not restricted his expenses since
they met; he will say you should have used your influence.'

She insisted on this, until the tears streamed from her eyes, telling me
that my grandfather was the most upright and unsuspicious of men, and
precisely on that account the severest when he thought he had been
deceived. The fair chances of my election did not console her, as it did
me, by dazzling me. She affirmed strongly that she was sure my father
expected success at the election to be equivalent to the promised
restitution of the money, and begged me to warn him that nothing short of
the sum squandered would be deemed sufficient at Riversley. My dear aunt,
good woman though she was, seemed to me to be waxing miserly. The squire
had given her the name of Parsimony; she had vexed him, Janet told me, by
subscribing a miserable sum to a sailors' asylum that he patronized--a
sum he was ashamed to see standing as the gift of a Beltham; and she had
stopped the building of a wing of her village school-house, designed upon
his plan. Altogether, she was fretful and distressful; she appeared to
thin