been already
said of this lady, which the reader may perhaps remember. She was
a year or two older than her brother, with whom she always lived,
but she had none of those properties of youth which belonged to him
in such abundance. She was, indeed, a poor cripple, unable to walk
beyond the limits of her own garden, feeble in health, dwarfed in
stature, robbed of all the ordinary enjoyments of life by physical
deficiencies, which made even the task of living a burden to her. To
eat was a pain, or at best a trouble. Sleep would not comfort her in
bed, and weariness during the day made it necessary that the hours
passed in bed should be very long. She was one of those whose lot in
life drives us to marvel at the inequalities of human destiny, and to
inquire curiously within ourselves whether future compensation is to
be given.

It is said of those who are small and crooked-backed in their bodies,
that their minds are equally cross-grained and their tempers as
ungainly as their stature. But no one had ever said this of Mary
Belton. Her friends, indeed, were very few in number; but those who
knew her well loved her as they knew her, and there were three or
four persons in the world who were ready at all times to swear that
she was faultless. It was the great happiness of her life that among
those three or four her own brother was the foremost. Will Belton's
love for his sister amounted almost to veneration, and his devotion
to her was so great, that in all the affairs of his life he was
prepared to make her comfort one of his first considerations. And
she, knowing this, had come to fear that she might be an embargo on
his prosperity, and a stumbling-block in the way of his success. It
had occurred to her that he would have married earlier in life if
she had not been, as it were, in his way; and she had threatened him
playfully,--for she could be playful,--that she would leave him if he
did not soon bring a mistress home to Plaistow Hall. "I will go to
uncle Robert," she had said. Now uncle Robert was the clergyman in
Lincolnshire of whom mention has been made, and he was among those
two or three who believed in Mary Belton with an implicit faith,--as
was also his wife. "I will go to uncle Robert, Will, and then you
will be driven to get a wife."

"If my sister ever leaves my house, whether there be a wife in it or
not," Will had answered, "I will never put trust in any woman again."

Plaistow Manor-house or Hall was a f