lustily for the
original idea of matching us; but the idea was no longer distasteful
to me. It appeared to me that if I must some day be married, a wife
who would enjoy my narratives, and travel over the four quarters of the
globe, as Janet promised to do, in search of him I loved, would be
the preferable person. I swore her to secresy; she was not to tell her
brother Charley the subject we conversed on.

'Oh dear, no!' said she, and told him straightway.

Charley, home for his winter holidays, blurted out at the squire's
table: 'So, Harry Richmond, you're the cleverest fellow in the world,
are you? There's Janet telling everybody your father's the cleverest
next to you, and she's never seen him!'

'How? hulloa, what 's that?' sang out the squire.

'Charley was speaking of my father, sir,' I said, preparing for thunder.

We all rose. The squire looked as though an apoplectic seizure were
coming on.

'Don't sit at my table again,' he said, after a terrible struggle to be
articulate.

His hand was stretched at me. I swung round to depart. 'No, no, not you;
that fellow,' he called, getting his arm level toward Charley.

I tried to intercede--the last who should have done it.

'You like to hear him, eh?' said the squire.

I was ready to say that I did, but my aunt, whose courage was up when
occasion summoned it, hushed the scene by passing the decanter to the
squire, and speaking to him in a low voice.

'Biter's bit. I've dished myself, that's clear,' said Charley; and he
spoke the truth, and such was his frankness that I forgave him.

He and Janet were staying at Riversley. They left next morning, for the
squire would not speak to him, nor I to Janet.

'I 'll tell you what; there 's no doubt about one thing,' said Charley;
'Janet's right--some of those girls are tremendously deep: you're about
the cleverest fellow I've ever met in my life. I thought of working into
the squire in a sort of collateral manner, you know. A cornetcy in the
Dragoon Guards in a year or two. I thought the squire might do that for
me without much damaging you;--perhaps a couple of hundred a year, just
to reconcile me to a nose out of joint. For, upon my honour, the
squire spoke of making me his heir--or words to that effect neatly
conjugated--before you came back; and rather than be a curate like that
Reverend Hart of yours, who hands raisins and almonds, and orange-flower
biscuits to your aunt the way of all the Reverends who drop d