ed up, his estate
passed to a distant relative, the rick Sir Gilbert Stafford.

Dalton, who long cherished the hope of a reconciliation, saw all
prospect vanish when his wife died, which she did, it was said, of a
broken heart. His debts were already considerable, and all the resources
of borrowing and mortgage had been long since exhausted; nothing was
then left for him but an arrangement with his creditors, which, giving
him a pittance scarcely above the very closest poverty, enabled him to
drag out life in the cheap places of the Continent; and thus, for nigh
twenty years, had he wandered about from Dieppe to Ostend, to Bruges, to
Dusseldorf, to Coblentz, and so on, among the small Ducal cities, till,
with still failing fortune, he was fain to seek a residence for the
winter in Baden, where house-rent, at least, would be almost saved to
him.

The same apathy that had brought on his ruin enabled him to bear it.
Nothing has such a mock resemblance to wisdom as utter heartlessness;
with all the seeming of true philosophy, it assumes a port and bearing
above the trials of the world; holds on "the even tenor of its way,"
undeterred by the reverses which overwhelm others, and even meets the
sternest frowns of fortune with the bland smile of equanimity.

In this way Dalton had deceived many who had known him in better days,
and who now saw him, even in his adversity, with the same careless,
good-natured look, as when he took the field with his own hounds, or
passed round the claret at his own table. Even his own children were
sharers in this delusion, and heard him with wondering admiration, as he
told of the life he used to lead, and the style he once kept up at Mount
Dalton. These were his favorite topics; and, as he grew older, he
seemed to find a kind of consolation in contrasting all the hard rubs of
present adversity with his once splendor.

Upon Ellen Dalton, who had known and could still remember her mother,
these recitals produced an impression of profound grief, associated as
they were with the sufferings of a sick-bed and the closing sorrows of a
life; while, in the others, they served to keep up a species of pride of
birth, and an assumption of superiority to others of like fortune,
which their father gloried in, representing, as he used to say, "the old
spirit of the Dal tons."

As for Kate, she felt it a compensation for present poverty to know that
they were of gentle blood, and that if fortune, at some