ther and mother had forgiven
him all his sins, and taken him again to their bosom. And the
marriage was matter of great moment, for the elder scion of the house
had not yet taken to himself a wife, and the de Courcy family might
have to look to this union for an heir. The lady herself was not
beautiful, or clever, or of imposing manners,--nor was she of high
birth. But neither was she ugly, nor unbearably stupid. Her manners
were, at any rate, innocent; and as to her birth,--seeing that, from
the first, she was not supposed to have had any,--no disappointment
was felt. Her father had been a coal-merchant. She was always called
Mrs George, and the effort made respecting her by everybody in and
about the family was to treat her as though she were a figure of
a woman, a large well-dressed resemblance of a being, whom it was
necessary for certain purposes that the de Courcys should carry in
their train. Of the Honourable George we may further observe, that,
having been a spendthrift all his life, he had now become strictly
parsimonious. Having reached the discreet age of forty, he had at
last learned that beggary was objectionable; and he, therefore,
devoted every energy of his mind to saving shillings and pence
wherever pence and shillings might be saved. When first this turn
came upon him both his father and mother were delighted to observe
it; but, although it had hardly yet lasted over twelve months, some
evil results were beginning to appear. Though possessed of an income,
he would take no steps towards possessing himself of a house. He
hung by the paternal mansion, either in town or country; drank the
paternal wines, rode the paternal horses, and had even contrived
to obtain his wife's dresses from the maternal milliner. In the
completion of which little last success, however, some slight family
dissent had showed itself.

The Honourable John, the third son, was also at Courcy. He had as yet
taken to himself no wife, and as he had not hitherto made himself
conspicuously useful in any special walk of life his family were
beginning to regard him as a burden. Having no income of his own to
save, he had not copied his brother's virtue of parsimony; and, to
tell the truth plainly, had made himself so generally troublesome to
his father, that he had been on more than one occasion threatened
with expulsion from the family roof. But it is not easy to expel a
son. Human fledglings cannot be driven out of the nest like young