ces. It was enough for a Waverley to
have sustained the public disgrace; the patrimonial injury could easily
be obviated by the head of their family. But it was both the opinion of
Mr. Richard Waverley and his own that Edward, the representative of the
family of Waverley-Honour, should not remain in a situation which
subjected him also to such treatment as that with which his father had
been stigmatised. He requested his nephew therefore to take the fittest,
and at the same time the most speedy, opportunity of transmitting his
resignation to the War Office, and hinted, moreover, that little ceremony
was necessary where so little had been used to his father. He sent
multitudinous greetings to the Baron of Bradwardine.

A letter from Aunt Rachel spoke out even more plainly. She considered the
disgrace of brother Richard as the just reward of his forfeiting his
allegiance to a lawful though exiled sovereign, and taking the oaths to
an alien; a concession which her grandfather, Sir Nigel Waverley, refused
to make, either to the Roundhead Parliament or to Cromwell, when his life
and fortune stood in the utmost extremity. She hoped her dear Edward
would follow the footsteps of his ancestors, and as speedily as possible
get rid of the badge of servitude to the usurping family, and regard the
wrongs sustained by his father as an admonition from Heaven that every
desertion of the line of loyalty becomes its own punishment. She also
concluded with her respects to Mr. Bradwardine, and begged Waverley would
inform her whether his daughter, Miss Rose, was old enough to wear a pair
of very handsome ear-rings, which she proposed to send as a token of her
affection. The good lady also desired to be informed whether Mr.
Bradwardine took as much Scotch snuff and danced as unweariedly as he did
when he was at Waverley-Honour about thirty years ago.

These letters, as might have been expected, highly excited Waverley's
indignation. From the desultory style of his studies, he had not any
fixed political opinion to place in opposition to the movements of
indignation which he felt at his father's supposed wrongs. Of the real
cause of his disgrace Edward was totally ignorant; nor had his habits at
all led him to investigate the politics of the period in which he lived,
or remark the intrigues in which his father had been so actively engaged.
Indeed, any impressions which he had accidentally adopted concerning the
parties of the times were (owi