had left
him,--that he should have given some counsel to the young man when he
came to ask for it. "You had better cut your throat!" In his troubled
spirit he had said that, and now his spirit was troubled the more
because he had so spoken. He sat for hours thinking of it all. Ralph
Newton was the undoubted heir to a very large property. He was now
embarrassed,--but all his present debts did not amount to much
more than half one year's income of that property which would be
his,--probably in about ten years. The Squire might live for twenty
years, or might die to-morrow; but his life-interest in the estate,
according to the usual calculations, was not worth more than ten
years' purchase. Could he, Sir Thomas, have been right to tell a
young man, whose prospects were so good, and whose debts, after all,
were so light, that he ought to go and cut his throat, as the only
way of avoiding a disreputable marriage which would otherwise be
forced upon him by the burden of his circumstances? Would not a
guardian, with any true idea of his duty, would not a friend, whose
friendship was in any degree real, have found a way out of such
difficulties as these?

And then as to the marriage itself,--the proposed marriage with the
breeches-maker's daughter,--the more Sir Thomas thought of it the
more distasteful did it become to him. He knew that Ralph was unaware
of all the evil that would follow such a marriage;--relatives whose
every thought and action and word would be distasteful to him;
children whose mother would not be a lady, and whose blood would
be polluted by an admixture so base;--and, worse still, a life's
companion who would be deficient in all those attributes which such a
man as Ralph Newton should look for in a wife. Sir Thomas was a man
to magnify rather than lesson these evils. And now he allowed his
friend,--a man for whose behalf he had bound himself to use all the
exercise of friendship,--to go from him with an idea that nothing
but suicide could prevent this marriage, simply because there was an
amount of debt, which, when compared with the man's prospects, should
hardly have been regarded as a burden! As he thought of all this Sir
Thomas was very unhappy.

Ralph had left him at about ten o'clock, and he then sat brooding
over his misery for about an hour. It was his custom when he remained
in his chambers to tell his clerk, Stemm, between nine and ten that
nothing more would be wanted. Then Stemm would go, an