g
Mary, packed up his things, and returned by the night train to
Westbury. At seven o'clock in the morning he reached home in a
Westbury gig, very cold, but upon the whole, a much more comfortable
man than when he had left it. He had almost brought himself to think
that even yet he would succeed at last.

CHAPTER XXXIII.

FAREWELL.

Christmas came, and a month beyond Christmas, and by the end of
January Captain Marrable and Miss Lowther had agreed to regard
all their autumn work as null and void,--to look back upon the
love-making as a thing that had not been, and to part as friends.
Both of them suffered much in this arrangement,--the man being the
louder in the objurgations which he made against his ill-fortune, and
in his assurances to himself and others that he was ruined for life.
And, indeed, no man could have been much more unhappy than was Walter
Marrable in these days. To him was added the trouble, which he did
not endeavour to hide from himself or Mary, that all this misery
came to him from his own father. Before the end of November, sundry
renewed efforts were made to save a portion of the money, and the
lawyers descended so low as to make an offer to take L2000. They
might have saved themselves the humiliation, for neither L2000 nor
L200 could have been made to be forthcoming. Walter Marrable, when
the time came, was painfully anxious to fight somebody; but he was
told very clearly by Messrs. Block and Curling, that there was nobody
whom he could fight but his father, and that even by fighting his
father, he would never obtain a penny. "My belief," said Mr. Curling,
"is, that you could put your father in prison, but that probably is
not your object." Marrable was forced to own that that was not his
object; but he did so in a tone which seemed to imply that a prison,
were it even for life, would be the best place for his father. Block
and Curling had been solicitors to the Marrables for ever so many
years; and though they did not personally love the Colonel, they
had a professional feeling that the blackness of a black sheep of a
family should not be made public, at any rate by the family itself
or by the family solicitors. Almost every family has a black sheep,
and it is the especial duty of a family solicitor to keep the family
black sheep from being dragged into the front and visible ranks
of the family. The Captain had been fatally wrong in signing the
paper which he had signed, and must take