habits grew more secluded and morose. It is not
to be supposed that he was troubled by those finer feelings which might
have made the misery of a better man; but even in his dull nature there
may have been some dim sense that his marriage was a failure and mistake;
that in having his own way in this matter he had in nowise secured his
own happiness. He could not complain of his wife's conduct in any one
respect. She was obedient to his will in all things, providing for his
comfort with scrupulous regularity, industrious, indefatigable even. As a
housekeeper and partner of his fortunes, no man could have desired a
better wife. Yet dimly, in that sluggish soul, there was the
consciousness that he had married a woman who hated him, that he had
bought her with a price; and, being a man prone to think the worst of his
fellow-creatures, Mr. Whitelaw believed that, sooner or later, his wife
meant to have her revenge upon him somehow. She was waiting for his death
perhaps; calculating that, being so much her senior, and a hard-working
man, he would die soon enough to leave her a young widow. And then, of
course, she would marry Frank Randall; and all the money which he,
Stephen, had amassed, by the sacrifice of every pleasure in life, would
enrich that supercilious young coxcomb.

It was a hard thing to think of, and Stephen pondered upon the expediency
of letting off Wyncomb Farm, and sinking all his savings in the purchase
of an annuity. He could not bring himself to contemplate selling the
house and lands that had belonged to his race for so many generations. He
clung to the estate, not from any romantic reverence for the past, not
from any sentimental associations connected with those who had gone
before him, but from the mere force of habit, which rendered this grim
ugly old house and these flat shelterless fields dearer to him than all
the rest of the universe. He was a man to whom to part with anything was
agony; and if he loved anything in the world, he loved Wyncomb. The
possession of the place had given him importance for twenty years past.
He could not fancy himself unconnected with Wyncomb. His labours had
improved the estate too; and he could not endure to think how some lucky
purchaser might profit by his prudence and sagacity. There had been some
fine old oaks on the land when he inherited it, all mercilessly
stubbed-up at the beginning of his reign; there had been tall straggling
hedgerows, all of a tangle with