r, and Mauleverer
your brother, so yours is by far the most respectable profession. No,
indeed, my family might be thankful to have any one in it who could do
as you have done."

Alison's scruples were thus disposed of, and when Edward's brain cleared
itself from platinum, he showed himself satisfied with the decision,
though he insisted on henceforth sending home a sum sufficient for his
daughter's expenses, and once said something that could be construed
into a hope of spending a quiet old age with her and his sister; but at
present he was manifestly out of his element, and was bent on returning
to Ekaterinburg immediately after the marriage.

His presence was but a qualified pleasure. Naturally shy and absent,
his broken spirits and removal from domestic life, and from society,
had exaggerated his peculiarities; and under the pressure of misfortune,
caused in a great measure by his own negligence, he had completely given
way, without a particle of his sister's patience or buoyancy, and had
merely striven to drown his troubles in engrossing problems of his
favourite pursuit, till the habit of abstraction had become too
confirmed to be shaken off. When the blot on his name was removed, he
was indeed sensible that he was no longer an exile, but he could
not resume his old standing, friendships rudely severed could not be
re-united; his absorption had grown by indulgence; old interests had
passed away; needful conformity to social habits was irksome, and even
his foreign manner and appearance testified to his entire unfitness for
English life.

Tibbie was in constant dread of his burning the house down, so
incalculable and preposterous were his hours, and the Colonel, longing
to render the house a perfect shrine for his bride, found it hard to
tolerate the fumes with which her brother saturated it. If he had been
sure that opium formed no portion of Edward's solace, his counsel to
Alison would have been less decisive. To poor little Rose, her father
was an abiding perplexity and distress; she wanted to love him, and
felt it absolute naughtiness to be constantly disappointed by his
insensibility to her approaches, or else repelled and disgusted by that
vice of the Russian sheep. And a vague hint of being transported to
the Ural mountains, away from Aunt Ermine, had haunted her of late more
dreadfully than even the lions of old; so that the relief was ineffable
when her dear Colonel confided to her that she was to be hi