se, though she knew that the excuse would not have
prevailed with her had she liked him. Then came his debts, and with the
knowledge of them a keener perception of his imperiousness. She could
consent to become the wife of the man who had squandered his property
and wasted his estate; but not of one who before his marriage demanded
of her that submission which, as she thought, should be given by her
freely after her marriage. Harry Annesley glided into her heart after a
manner very different from this. She knew that he adored her, but yet he
did not hasten to tell her so. She knew that she loved him, but she
doubted whether a time would ever come in which she could confess it. It
was not till he had come to acknowledge the trouble to which Mountjoy
had subjected him that he had ever ventured to speak plainly of his own
passion, and even then he had not asked for a reply. She was still free,
as she thought of all this, but she did at last tell herself that, let
her mother say what she would, she certainly never would stand at the
altar with her cousin Mountjoy.

Even now, when the captain had been declared not to be his father's
heir, and when all the world knew that he had disappeared from the face
of the earth, Mrs. Mountjoy did not altogether give him up. She partly
disbelieved her brother, and partly thought that circumstances could not
be so bad as they were described.

To her feminine mind,--to her, living, not in the world of London, but in
the very moderate fashion of Cheltenham,--it seemed to be impossible that
an entail should be thus blighted in the bud. Why was an entail called
an entail unless it were ineradicable,--a decision of fate rather than of
man and of law? And to her eyes Mountjoy Scarborough was so commanding
that all things must at last be compelled to go as he would have them.
And, to tell the truth, there had lately come to Mrs. Mountjoy a word of
comfort, which might be necessary if the world should be absolutely
upset in accordance with the wicked skill of her brother, which even in
that case might make crooked things smooth. Augustus, whom she had
regarded always as quite a Mountjoy, because of his talent, and
appearance, and habit of command, had whispered to her a word. Why
should not Florence be transferred with the remainder of the property?
There was something to Mrs. Mountjoy's feelings base in the idea at the
first blush of it. She did not like to be untrue to her gallant nephew.
But