r of
these things was true. They married with a great deal more pleasure and
ease of mind than many people do who are very much in love, for they had
mutual faith in each other, and felt a mutual repose and satisfaction in
their union. Each supplied something the other wanted. Lucy obtained a
secure and settled home, a protector and ever kind and genial guardian,
while Sir Tom got not only a good and dutiful and pleasant companion,
with a great deal of sense, and good-nature and good looks,--all of
which gifts he prized highly,--but at the same time the control of a
great fortune, and money enough at once to clear his estates and restore
him to his position as a great landowner.

There were very peculiar conditions attached to the great fortune, but
to these for the moment he paid very little heed, considering them as
fantastic follies not worth thinking about, which were never likely to
become difficulties in his way. The advantage he derived from the
marriage was enormous. All at once, at a bound, it restored him to what
he had lost, to the possession of his own property, which had been not
more than nominally his for so many years, and to the position of a man
of weight and importance, whose opinion told with all his neighbours and
the county generally, as did those of few others in the district.

Sir Tom, the wanderer, had not been thought very highly of in his
younger days. He had been called wild. He had been thought
untrustworthy, a fellow here to-day and gone to-morrow, who had no
solidity in him. But when the mortgages were all paid off, and the old
hall restored, and Sir Thomas Randolph came to settle down at home, with
his pretty little wife, and an establishment quite worthy of his name,
the county discovered in a day, almost in a moment, that he was very
much improved. He had always been clever enough, they said, for
anything, and now that he had sown his wild oats and learned how to
conduct himself, and attained an age when follies are naturally over,
there was no reason why he should not be received with open arms. Such a
man had a great many more experiences, the county thought with a certain
pride, than other men who had sown no wild oats, and had never gone
farther afield than the recognised round of European cities. Sir Tom had
been in all the four quarters of the globe; he had travelled in America
long before it became fashionable to do so, and even had been in Africa
while it was as yet untrod by a