aps suggested
more than she knew. Walter Marrable had quarrelled with his father,
the Colonel,--with whom, indeed, everybody of the name of Marrable
had always been quarrelling, and who was believed by Miss Marrable to
be the very--mischief himself. He was a man always in debt, who had
broken his wife's heart, who lived with low company and disgraced the
family, who had been more than once arrested, on whose behalf all
the family interest had been expended, so that nobody else could get
anything, and who gambled and drank and did whatever wicked things
a wicked old colonel living at Portsmouth could do. And indeed,
hitherto, Miss Marrable had entertained opinions hardly more
charitable respecting the son than she had done in regard to
the father. She had disbelieved in this branch of the Marrables
altogether. Captain Marrable had lived with his father a good
deal,--at least, so she had understood,--and therefore could not but
be bad. And, moreover, our Miss Sarah Marrable had, throughout her
whole life, been somewhat estranged from the elder branches of the
family. Her father, Walter, had been,--so she thought,--injured by
his brother Sir Gregory, and there had been some law proceedings, not
quite amicable, between her brother the parson, and the present Sir
Gregory. She respected Sir Gregory as the head of the family, but she
never went now to Dunripple, and knew nothing of Sir Gregory's heir.
Of the present Parson John she had thought very little before he had
come to Loring. Since he had been living there she had found that
blood was thicker than water,--as she would say,--and they two were
intimate. When she heard that Captain Marrable was coming, because
he had quarrelled with his father, she began to think that perhaps
it might be as well that she should allow herself to meet this new
cousin.

"What do you think of your cousin, Walter?" the old clergyman said to
his nephew, one evening, after the two ladies, who had been dining at
the Rectory, had left them. It was the first occasion on which Walter
Marrable had met Mary since his coming to Loring.

"I remember her as well as if it were yesterday, at Dunripple. She
was a little girl then, and I thought her the most beautiful little
girl in the world."

"We all think her very beautiful still."

"So she is; as lovely as ever she can stand. But she does not seem to
have much to say for herself. I remember when she was a little girl
she never would speak."

"I