t were going to fall
off. He shambled with his legs, which seemed never to be strong
enough to carry him from one room to another; and he tried them by no
other exercise, for he never went outside the house except when, on
Sundays and some other very rare occasions, he would trust himself to
be driven in a low pony-phaeton. But in one respect he was altogether
unlike his father. His whole time was spent among his books, and he
was at this moment engaged in revising and editing a very long and
altogether unreadable old English chronicle in rhyme, for publication
by one of those learned societies which are rife in London. Of Robert
of Gloucester, and William Langland, of Andrew of Wyntown and the
Lady Juliana Berners, he could discourse, if not with eloquence, at
least with enthusiasm. Chaucer was his favourite poet, and he was
supposed to have read the works of Gower in English, French, and
Latin. But he was himself apparently as old as one of his own
black-letter volumes, and as unfit for general use. Walter could
hardly regard him as a cousin, declaring to himself that his uncle
the parson, and his own father were, in effect, younger men than the
younger Gregory Marrable. He was never without a cough, never well,
never without various ailments and troubles of the flesh,--of which,
however, he himself made but slight account, taking them quite as a
matter of course. With such inmates the house no doubt would have
been dull, had there not been women there to enliven it.

By degrees, too, and not by slow degrees, the new comer found that
he was treated as one of the family,--found that, after a certain
fashion, he was treated as the heir to the family. Between him and
the title and the estate there were but the lives of four old men.
Why had he not known that this was so before he had allowed himself
to be separated from Mary Lowther? But he had known nothing of
it,--had thought not at all about it. There had been another
Marrable, of the same generation with himself, between him and
the succession, who might marry and have children, and he had not
regarded his heirship as being likely to have any effect, at any rate
upon his early life. It had never occurred to him that he need not go
to India, because he would probably outlive four old gentlemen and
become Sir Walter Marrable and owner of Dunripple.

Nor would he have looked at the matter in that light now had not his
cousin forced the matter upon him. Not a word was