his to any of your friends on pain of my
displeasure.

"N.B. Lady B. was so angry when I told her that I had not come to her
before. She would do anything in the world for me. I like her next best
to my father and Austin. Good-bye old Rip."

Poor little Letitia, after three perusals of this ingenuous epistle,
where the laws of punctuation were so disregarded, resigned it to one of
the pockets of her brother Ripton's best jacket, deeply smitten with the
careless composer. And so ended the last act of the Bakewell Comedy, in
which the curtain closes with Sir Austin's pointing out to his friends
the beneficial action of the System in it from beginning to end.

CHAPTER XII

Laying of ghosts is a public duty, and, as the mystery of the apparition
that had frightened little Clare was never solved on the stage of events
at Raynham, where dread walked the Abbey, let us go behind the scenes a
moment. Morally superstitious as the baronet was, the character of his
mind was opposed to anything like spiritual agency in the affairs of men,
and, when the matter was made clear to him, it shook off a weight of
weakness and restored his mental balance; so that from this time he went
about more like the man he had once been, grasping more thoroughly the
great truth, that This World is well designed. Nay, he could laugh on
hearing Adrian, in reminiscence of the ill luck of one of the family
members at its first manifestation, call the uneasy spirit, Algernon's
Leg.

Mrs. Doria was outraged. She maintained that her child had seen ---- Not
to believe in it was almost to rob her of her personal property. After
satisfactorily studying his old state of mind in her, Sir Austin, moved
by pity, took her aside one day and showed her that her Ghost could write
words in the flesh. It was a letter from the unhappy lady who had given
Richard birth,--brief cold lines, simply telling him his house would be
disturbed by her no more. Cold lines, but penned by what heart-broken
abnegation, and underlying them with what anguish of soul! Like most who
dealt with him, Lady Feverel thought her husband a man fatally stern and
implacable, and she acted as silly creatures will act when they fancy
they see a fate against them: she neither petitioned for her right nor
claimed it: she tried to ease her heart's yearning by stealth, and, now
she renounced all. Mrs. Doria, not wanting in the family tenderness and
softness, shuddered at him for accepting the s