surprised him.

"Dear Mr. Hartington,--In accordance with your instructions I at once
informed the Receiver of the bank that you were prepared to hand over
the Fairclose estates for the benefit of the creditors, instead of
waiting for the calls to be made, and that you wished the matter to be
arranged as speedily as possible as you were shortly going abroad. The
necessary deeds will in a few days be prepared. You will doubtless be
surprised to hear that I have arranged with the Receiver for the
purchase of the estates by private treaty. I have long been intending to
retire from business, and have been on the lookout for an estate in the
county. I hope this arrangement will not be displeasing to you."

As Mr. Brander had the reputation of being a wealthy man, and his wife's
wishes that he should retire from business and purchase an estate in the
county were public property, Cuthbert was not surprised, but at the same
time he was not altogether pleased. He had never liked the lawyer. He
had no particular grounds for not doing so, but he had as a boy an
instinctive notion that he was a humbug.

"I wonder," he said to himself, "whether he has all along had an eye to
Fairclose, and whether he really did his best to dissuade my father from
making that disastrous investment. At any rate, it does not make any
difference to me who is there. It might have been some stranger, some
manufacturing fellow; I would rather think of Mary being at the old
place than a man of that sort. He would have been more likely than
Brander to be hard on the tenants, and to have sold off all the things
and have turned the place inside out. I don't say that under ordinary
circumstances I should choose Brander as a landlord, but he will know
well enough that there would be nothing that would do him more harm in
the county than a report that he was treating the Squire's tenants
harshly. Well, I suppose I had better write him a line saying that I am
glad to hear that he has bought the place, as I would naturally prefer
that it should be in his hands than those of a stranger."

A fortnight later, Cuthbert, in looking over the "Abchester Guardian,"
which was sent to him weekly, as the subscription was not yet run out,
read the following paragraph: "We understand that our greatly respected
townsman, Mr. J. Brander, has purchased the house and estate of
Fairclose, which has come into the market owing to the failure of the
Abchester Bank, in which the late