hoped to have the pleasure of seeing them with his mother and sister
on the following day. He was aware that his cousin was not coming. He
believed that his cousin Roger never did go anywhere like any one
else. No; he had not seen Mr Longestaffe. He hoped to have the
pleasure of seeing him to-morrow. Then he escaped, and got on his
horse, and rode away.

'That's going to be the lucky man,' said Georgiana to her mother, that
evening.

'In what way lucky?'

'He is going to get the heiress and all the money. What a fool Dolly
has been!'

'I don't think it would have suited Dolly,' said Lady Pomona. 'After
all, why should not Dolly marry a lady?'

CHAPTER XVIII - RUBY RUGGLES HEARS A LOVE TALE

Ruby Ruggles, the granddaughter of old Daniel Ruggles, of Sheep's
Acre, in the parish of Sheepstone, close to Bungay, received the
following letter from the hands of the rural post letter-carrier on
that Sunday morning;--'A friend will be somewhere near Sheepstone
Birches between four and five o'clock on Sunday afternoon.' There was
not another word in the letter, but Miss Ruby Ruggles knew well from
whom it came.

Daniel Ruggles was a farmer, who had the reputation of considerable
wealth, but who was not very well looked on in the neighbourhood as
being somewhat of a curmudgeon and a miser. His wife was dead;--he had
quarrelled with his only son, whose wife was also dead, and had
banished him from his home;--his daughters were married and away; and
the only member of his family who lived with him was his granddaughter
Ruby. And this granddaughter was a great trouble to the old man. She
was twenty-three years old, and had been engaged to a prosperous young
man at Bungay in the meal and pollard line, to whom old Ruggles had
promised to give L500 on their marriage. But Ruby had taken it into
her foolish young head that she did not like meal and pollard, and now
she had received the above very dangerous letter. Though the writer
had not dared to sign his name she knew well that it came from Sir
Felix Carbury,--the most beautiful gentleman she had ever set her eyes
upon. Poor Ruby Ruggles! Living down at Sheep's Acre, on the Waveney,
she had heard both too much and too little of the great world beyond
her ken. There were, she thought, many glorious things to be seen
which she would never see were she in these her early years to become
the wife of John Crumb, the dealer in meal and pollard at Bungay.
Therefore she was fu