or legal assistance. True, he had
called in no lawyer himself; true, he had been no consenting party to
the employment of either Cox and Cummins, or Sir Abraham; he had never
been consulted on such matters;--the archdeacon had managed all this
himself, never for a moment suspecting that Mr Harding would take upon
him to end the matter in a way of his own. Had the lawyers' bills
been ten thousand pounds, Mr Harding could not have helped it; but
he was not on that account disposed to dispute his own liability.
The question never occurred to him; but it did occur to him that he
had very little money at his banker's, that he could receive nothing
further from the hospital, and that the sale of the furniture was his
only resource.

"Not all, papa," said Eleanor pleadingly.

"Not quite all, my dear," said he; "that is, if we can help it. We
must have a little at Crabtree,--but it can only be a little; we
must put a bold front on it, Nelly; it isn't easy to come down from
affluence to poverty."

And so they planned their future mode of life; the father taking
comfort from the reflection that his daughter would soon be freed from
it, and she resolving that her father would soon have in her own house
a ready means of escape from the solitude of the Crabtree vicarage.

When the archdeacon left his wife and father-in-law at the Chapter
Coffee House to go to Messrs Cox and Cummins, he had no very defined
idea of what he had to do when he got there. Gentlemen when at law,
or in any way engaged in matters requiring legal assistance, are very
apt to go to their lawyers without much absolute necessity;--gentlemen
when doing so, are apt to describe such attendance as quite
compulsory, and very disagreeable. The lawyers, on the other hand,
do not at all see the necessity, though they quite agree as to the
disagreeable nature of the visit;--gentlemen when so engaged are
usually somewhat gravelled at finding nothing to say to their learned
friends; they generally talk a little politics, a little weather, ask
some few foolish questions about their suit, and then withdraw, having
passed half an hour in a small dingy waiting-room, in company with
some junior assistant-clerk, and ten minutes with the members of the
firm; the business is then over for which the gentleman has come up
to London, probably a distance of a hundred and fifty miles. To be
sure he goes to the play, and dines at his friend's club, and has a
bachelor's liberty a