way of dress. Even her
diamonds--and the young man knew something about these gems--must be of
considerable value; and yet she wore them carelessly, as it pleased her
fancy. She had precious old laces, too, almost worth their weight in
diamonds; laces which had been snatched from altars in ancient Spanish
cathedrals during the wars, and which it would not be safe to leave
a duchess alone with for ten minutes. The old house was fat with the
deposits of rich generations which had gone before. The famous "golden"
fire-set was a purchase of one of the family who had been in France
during the Revolution, and must have come from a princely palace, if not
from one of the royal residences. As for silver, the iron closet
which had been made in the dining-room wall was running over with
it: tea-kettles, coffee-pots, heavy-lidded tankards, chafing-dishes,
punch-bowls, all that all the Dudleys had ever used, from the caudle-cup
which used to be handed round the young mother's chamber, and the
porringer from which children scooped their bread-and-milk with spoons
as solid as ingots, to that ominous vessel, on the upper shelf, far back
in the dark, with a spout like a slender italic S, out of which the sick
and dying, all along the last century, and since, had taken the last
drops that passed their lips. Without being much of a scholar, Dick
could see well enough, too, that the books in the library had been
ordered from the great London houses, whose imprint they bore, by
persons who knew what was best and meant to have it. A man does not
require much learning to feel pretty sure, when he takes one of those
solid, smooth, velvet-leaved quartos, say a Baskerville Addison, for
instance, bound in red morocco, with a margin of gold as rich as the
embroidery of a prince's collar, as Vandyck drew it,--he need not know
much to feel pretty sure that a score or two of shelves full of such
books mean that it took a long purse, as well as a literary taste, to
bring them together.

To all these attractions the mind of this thoughtful young gentleman
may be said to have been fully open. He did not disguise from himself,
however, that there were a number of drawbacks in the way of his
becoming established as the heir of the Dudley mansion-house and
fortune. In the first place, Cousin Elsie was, unquestionably, very
piquant, very handsome, game as a hawk, and hard to please, which
made her worth trying for. But then there was something about Cousi