order to surrender the house and demesne was
also issued. The servants talked openly of the approaching break-up of
the household, and already vague and shadowy rumors ran that my father
had died intestate, and that my mother was left without a shilling.

From early morning till late at night, MacNaghten had toiled without
ceasing. He had visited lawyers, attended consultations, instituted
fresh searches through Crowther's papers, but all with the same result.
The most hopeful counsels only promised a barren resistance, the less
sanguine advisers recommended any compromise that might secure to my
mother some moderate competence to live on. So much had the course of
events preyed upon his mind, and so dispirited had he grown that, as he
afterwards owned, he found himself listening to arguments, and willing
to entertain projects, which, had they been presented but a few weeks
before, he had rejected with scorn and indignation. It was then, too,
and for the first time, that the possibility struck him that my father's
marriage might have been solemnized without that formality which should
make it good in law. He remembered the reserve with which, in all their
frank friendship, the subject was ever treated. He bethought him of the
reluctance with which my father suffered himself to be drawn into any
allusion to that event; and that, in fact, it was the only theme on
which they never conversed in perfect frankness and sincerity.

"After all," thought he, "the matter may be difficult of proof. There
may have been reasons, real or imaginary, for secrecy; there may
have been certain peculiar circumstances requiring unusual caution or
mystery; but Watty was quite incapable of presenting to his friends and
to the world as his wife one who had not every title to the name, while
she who held that place gave the best guarantee, by her manner and
conduct, that it was hers by right." To this consolation he was obliged
to fall back at each new moment of discomfiture; but although it served
to supply him with fresh energy and courage, it also oppressed him with
the sad reflection that conviction and belief in his friend's honor
would have no weight in the legal discussion of the case, and that one
scrawled fragment of paper would be better in evidence than all the
trustfulness that was ever inspired by friendship.

If gifted with a far more than common amount of resolution and energy,
MacNaghten was by nature impulsive to rashness, and