r
fellow! How noble of him! What _can_ such men as this see in any woman
to go and fall in love with her?"

Griffith found her with a tear in her eye. He took her out walking, and
laid all his radiant plans of wedded life before her. She came back
flushed, and beaming with complacency and beauty.

Old Peyton was brought to consent to the marriage. Only he attached one
condition, that Bolton and Hernshaw should be settled on Kate for her
separate use.

To this Griffith assented readily; but Kate refused plump. "What, give
him _myself_, and then grudge him my _estates_!" said she, with a look
of lofty and beautiful scorn at her male advisers.

But Father Francis, having regard to the temporal interests of his
Church, exerted his strength and pertinacity, and tired her out; so
those estates were put into trustees' hands, and tied up tight as wax.

This done, Griffith Gaunt and Kate Peyton were married, and made the
finest pair that wedded in the county that year.

As the bells burst into a merry peal, and they walked out of church man
and wife, their path across the churchyard was strewed thick with
flowers, emblematic, no doubt, of the path of life that lay before so
handsome a couple.

They spent the honeymoon in London, and tasted earthly felicity.

Yet did not quarrel after it; but subsided into the quiet complacency of
wedded life.

CHAPTER XIV.

Mr. and Mrs. Gaunt lived happily together--as times went.

A fine girl and boy were born to them; and need I say how their hearts
expanded and exulted, and seemed to grow twice as large.

The little boy was taken from them at three years old; and how can I
convey to any but a parent the anguish of that first bereavement?

Well, they suffered it together, and that poignant grief was one tie
more between them.

For many years they did not furnish any exciting or even interesting
matter to this narrator. And all the better for them: without these
happy periods of dulness our lives would be hell, and our hearts
eternally bubbling and boiling in a huge pot made hot with thorns.

In the absence of striking incidents, it may be well to notice the
progress of character, and note the tiny seeds of events to come.

Neither the intellectual nor the moral character of any person stands
stock-still: a man improves, or he declines. Mrs. Gaunt had a great
taste for reading; Mr. Gaunt had not: what was the consequence? At the
end of seven years the lady's understanding