ut at
last she allowed me to break one, and lo! it had been half boiled by the
advertiser. "This is very sad," cried Mrs. Hockin; and the patient old
hen, who was come in a basket of hay to see the end of it, echoed with a
cluck that sentiment.

These things being so, I was left once more to follow my own guidance,
which had seemed, in the main, to be my fortune ever since my father
died. For one day Mr. Shovelin had appeared, to my great joy and
comfort, as a guide and guardian; but, alas! for one day only. And,
except for his good advice and kind paternal conduct to me, it seemed
at present an unlucky thing that I had ever discovered him. Not only
through deep sense of loss and real sorrow for him, but also because
Major Hockin, however good and great and generous, took it unreasonably
into his head that I threw him over, and threw myself (as with want of
fine taste he expressed it) into the arms of the banker. This hurt
me very much, and I felt that Major Hockin could never have spoken so
hastily unless his hair had been originally red; and so it might be
detected, even now, where it survived itself, though blanched where he
brushed it into that pretentious ridge. Sometimes I liked that man, when
his thoughts were large and liberal; but no sooner had he said a fine
brave thing than he seemed to have an after-thought not to go too
far with it; just as he had done about the poor robbed woman from the
steerage and the young man who pulled out his guinea. I paid him for
my board and lodging, upon a scale settled by Uncle Sam himself, at
California prices; therefore I am under no obligation to conceal his
foibles. But, take him altogether, he was good and brave and just,
though unable, from absence of inner light, to be to me what Uncle Sam
had been.

When I perceived that the Major condemned my simple behavior in London,
and (if I may speak it, as I said it to myself) "blew hot and cold" in
half a minute--hot when I thought of any good things to be done, and
cold as soon as he became the man to do them--also, when I remembered
what a chronic plague was now at Bruntsea, in the shape of Sir Montague,
who went to and fro, but could never be trusted to be far off, I
resolved to do what I had long been thinking of, and believed that
my guardian, if he had lived another day, would have recommended. I
resolved to go and see Lord Castlewood, my father's first cousin and
friend in need.

When I asked my host and hostess what