I don't know whether it wouldn't be better for you to make
it up with my cousin, and have him down here."

"What cousin?" said the Squire, turning sharply round.

"With Gregory's eldest brother." The reader will perhaps remember
that the Gregory of that day was the parson. "I believe he is a good
fellow, and he has done you no harm."

"He has done me all harm."

"No; father; no. We cannot help ourselves, you know. Were he to die,
Gregory would be in the same position. It would be better that the
family should be kept together."

"I would sooner have the devil here. No consideration on earth shall
induce me to allow him to put his foot upon this place. No;--not
whilst I live." The son said nothing further, and they sat together
in silence for some quarter of an hour,--after which the elder of the
two rose from his chair, and, coming round the table, put his hand
on the son's shoulder, and kissed his son's brow. "Father," said
the young man, "you think that I am troubled by things which hardly
touch me at all." "By God, they touch me close enough!" said the
elder. This had taken place some month or two before the date of Sir
Thomas's letter;--but any reference to the matter of which they were
both no doubt always thinking was very rare between them.

Newton Priory was a place which a father might well wish to leave
unimpaired to his son. It lay in the north of Hampshire, where that
county is joined to Berkshire; and perhaps in England there is no
prettier district, no country in which moorland and woodland and
pasture are more daintily thrown together to please the eye, in which
there is a sweeter air, or a more thorough seeming of English wealth
and English beauty and English comfort. Those who know Eversley and
Bramshill and Heckfield and Strathfieldsaye will acknowledge that
it is so. But then how few are the Englishmen who travel to see the
beauties of their own country! Newton Priory, or Newton Peele as the
parish was called, lay somewhat west of these places, but was as
charming as any of them. The entire parish belonged to Mr. Newton, as
did portions of three or four parishes adjoining. The house itself
was neither large nor remarkable for its architecture;--but it was
comfortable. The rooms indeed were low, for it had been built in the
ungainly days of Queen Anne, with additions in the equally ungainly
time of George II., and the passages were long and narrow, and the
bedrooms were up and down stairs, as th