d cheated at play.

As for Mr. Hattersley, he had never wholly forgotten his resolution to
'come out from among them,' and behave like a man and a Christian, and
the last illness and death of his once jolly friend Huntingdon so deeply
and seriously impressed him with the evil of their former practices, that
he never needed another lesson of the kind. Avoiding the temptations of
the town, he continued to pass his life in the country, immersed in the
usual pursuits of a hearty, active, country gentleman; his occupations
being those of farming, and breeding horses and cattle, diversified with
a little hunting and shooting, and enlivened by the occasional
companionship of his friends (better friends than those of his youth),
and the society of his happy little wife (now cheerful and confiding as
heart could wish), and his fine family of stalwart sons and blooming
daughters. His father, the banker, having died some years ago and left
him all his riches, he has now full scope for the exercise of his
prevailing tastes, and I need not tell you that Ralph Hattersley, Esq.,
is celebrated throughout the country for his noble breed of horses.

CHAPTER LI

We will now turn to a certain still, cold, cloudy afternoon about the
commencement of December, when the first fall of snow lay thinly
scattered over the blighted fields and frozen roads, or stored more
thickly in the hollows of the deep cart-ruts and footsteps of men and
horses impressed in the now petrified mire of last month's drenching
rains. I remember it well, for I was walking home from the vicarage with
no less remarkable a personage than Miss Eliza Millward by my side. I
had been to call upon her father,--a sacrifice to civility undertaken
entirely to please my mother, not myself, for I hated to go near the
house; not merely on account of my antipathy to the once so bewitching
Eliza, but because I had not half forgiven the old gentleman himself for
his ill opinion of Mrs. Huntingdon; for though now constrained to
acknowledge himself mistaken in his former judgment, he still maintained
that she had done wrong to leave her husband; it was a violation of her
sacred duties as a wife, and a tempting of Providence by laying herself
open to temptation; and nothing short of bodily ill-usage (and that of no
trifling nature) could excuse such a step--nor even that, for in such a
case she ought to appeal to the laws for protection. But it was not of
him I intended to