ment. There I think I have
been saved from a misfortune which would certainly have driven me mad.
That woman's voice daily in my ear could have had no other effect. I
have at any rate been saved from that."

"What is it, then, that troubles you?"

"Everybody knows that I intended it. All the country has heard of it.
But yet was not my purpose a good one? Why should not a gentleman marry
if he wants to leave his estate to his own son?"

"Of course he must marry before he can do that."

"Where was I to get a young lady--just outside of my own class? There
was Miss Puffle. I did think of her. But just at the moment she went off
with young Tazlehurst. That was another misfortune. Why should Miss
Puffle have descended so low just before I had thought of her? And I
couldn't marry quite a young girl. How could I expect such a one to live
here with me at Buston, where it is rather dull? When I looked about
there was nobody except that horrid Miss Thoroughbung. You just look
about and tell me if there was any one else. Of course my circle is
circumscribed. I have been very careful whom I have admitted to my
intimacy, and the result is that I know almost nobody. I may say that I
was driven to ask Miss Thoroughbung."

"But why marry at all unless you're fond of somebody to be attached to?"

"Ah!"

"Why marry at all? I say. I ask the question knowing very well why you
intended to do it."

"Then why do you ask?" he said, angrily.

"Because it is so difficult to talk of Harry to you. Of course I cannot
help feeling that you have injured him."

"It is he that has injured me. It is he that has brought me to this
condition. Don't you know that you've all been laughing at me down at
the rectory since this affair of that terrible woman?" While he paused
for an answer to his question Mrs. Annesley sat silent. "You know it is
true. He and that man whom Molly means to marry, and the other girls,
and their father and you, have all been laughing at me."

"I have never laughed."

"But the others?" And again he waited for a reply. But the no reply
which came did as well as any other answer. There was the fact that he
had been ridiculed by the very young man whom it was intended that he
should support by his liberality. It was impossible to tell him that a
man who had made himself so absurd must expect to be laughed at by his
juniors. There was running through his mind an idea that very much was
due to him from Harry; but there was