Earl's
daughter. Perhaps it was as well as it was. The girl had never loved
him, and he could now choose for himself;--and need not choose till
it should be his pleasure to settle himself as a married man. After
all, his marriage with Lady Anna would have been a constrained
marriage,--a marriage which he would have accepted as the means of
making his fortune. The girl certainly had pleased him;--but it
might be that a girl who preferred a tailor would not have continued
to please him. At any rate he could not be unhappy with his
newly-acquired fortune, and he went down to Yoxham to receive the
congratulation of his friends, thinking that it would become him now
to make some exertion towards reconciling his uncle and aunt to the
coming marriage.

"Have you heard anything about Mr. Thwaite?" Mr. Flick said to him
the day before he started. The Earl had heard nothing. "They say that
he has been wounded by a pistol-ball." Lord Lovel stayed some days at
a friend's house on his road into Yorkshire, and when he reached the
rectory, the rector had received news from London. Mr. Thwaite the
tailor had been murdered, and it was surmised that the deed had been
done by the Countess. "I trust the papers were signed before you
left London," said the anxious rector. The documents making over
the property were all right, but the Earl would believe nothing of
the murder. Mr. Thwaite might have been wounded. He had heard so
much before,--but he was quite sure that it had not been done by the
Countess. On the following day further tidings came. Mr. Thwaite was
doing well, but everybody said that the attempt had been made by Lady
Lovel. Thus by degrees some idea of the facts as they had occurred
was received at the rectory.

"You don't mean that you want us to have Mr. Thwaite here?" said the
rector, holding up his hands, upon hearing a proposition made to him
by his nephew a day or two later.

"Why not, uncle Charles?"

"I couldn't do it. I really don't think your aunt could bring herself
to sit down to table with him."

"Aunt Jane?"

"Yes, your aunt Jane,--or your aunt Julia either." Now a quieter lady
than aunt Jane, or one less likely to turn up her nose at any guest
whom her husband should choose to entertain, did not exist.

"May I ask my aunts?"

"What good can it do, Frederic?"

"He's going to marry our cousin. He's not at all such a man as you
seem to think."

"He has been a journeyman tailor all his life."

"You