the house at the home farm, rent free. What do you say to that,
Annaple?'

There was a silence, then Annaple said: 'Give up the umbrellas! Oh!
What do you think, Mark?'

'My father wishes it,' said Mark. 'He would, as he had promised to do,
make over to me my share of my own mother's fortune, and that would, I
have been reckoning, bring us to just what we had thought of starting
upon this spring at Micklethwayte.'

'The same now,' said Lady Ronnisglen, after some reckoning, 'but what
does it lead to?'

'Well--nothing, I am afraid,' said Mark; 'as you know, this is all I
have to reckon upon. The younger children will have hardly anything
from their mother, so that my father's means must chiefly go to them.'

'And this agency is entirely dependent on your satisfying Mr. Egremont?'

'True, but that's a thing only too easily done. However, as you say,
this agency has no future, and if that came to an end, I should only
have to look out for another or take to farming.'

'And ask poor John if that is a good speculation nowadays!' said
Annaple.

'Fortunes are and have been made on the umbrellas,' said Mark.
'Greenleaf has a place almost equal to Monks Horton, and Dutton, though
he makes no show, has realised a considerable amount.'

'Oh yes, let us stick to the umbrellas!' cried Annaple; 'you've made
the plunge, so it does not signify now, and we should be so much more
independent out of the way of everybody.'

'You would lose in society,' said Mark, 'excepting, of course, as to
the Monks Horton people; but they are often away.'

'Begging your pardon, Mark, is there much to lose in this same
neighbourhood?' laughed Annaple, 'now May will go.'

'It is not so much a question of liking,' added her mother, 'as of what
is for the best, and where you may wish to be--say ten years hence.'

Looked at in this way, there could be no question but that the umbrella
company promised to make Mark a richer man in ten years' time than did
the agency at Bridgefield Egremont. He had a salary from the office
already, and if he purchased shares in the partnership with the portion
his father would resign to him, his income would already equal what he
would have at Bridgefield, and there was every prospect of its
increase, both as he became more valuable, and as the business
continued to prosper. If the descent in life had been a grievance to
the ladies, the agency would have been an infinite boon, but having
swallowed so mu