I

When the Presidential campaign was at its height; when in various
sections of the United States "the boy orator of La Platte" was making
invidious remarks concerning the Republican Party, and in Canton (Ohio)
Mr. M.A. Hanna was cheerfully expressing his confidence as to the
outcome of it all; when the Czar and the Czarina were visiting President
Faure in Paris "amid unparalleled enthusiasm"; and when semi-educated
people were appraising, with a glibness possible to ignorance only, the
literary achievements of William Morris and George du Maurier, who had
just died:--at this remote time, Roger Stapylton returned to Lichfield.

For in that particular October Patricia's father, an accommodating
physician having declared old Roger Stapylton's health to necessitate a
Southern sojourn, leased the Bellingham mansion in Lichfield. It
happened that, by rare good luck, Tom Bellingham--of the Bellinghams of
Assequin, not the Bellinghams of Bellemeade, who indeed immigrated after
the War of 1812 and have never been regarded as securely established
from a social standpoint,--was at this time in pecuniary difficulties on
account of having signed another person's name to a cheque.

Roger Stapylton refurnished the house in the extreme degree of
Lichfieldian elegance. Colonel Musgrave was his mentor throughout the
process; and the oldest families of Lichfield very shortly sat at table
with the former overseer, and not at all unwillingly, since his dinners
were excellent and an infatuated Rudolph Musgrave--an axiom now in
planning any list of guests,--was very shortly to marry the man's
daughter.

In fact, the matter had been settled; and Colonel Musgrave had received
from Roger Stapylton an exuberantly granted charter of courtship.

This befell, indeed, upon a red letter day in Roger Stapylton's life.
The banker was in business matters wonderfully shrewd, as divers
transactions, since the signing of that half-forgotten contract whereby
he was to furnish a certain number of mules for the Confederate service,
strikingly attested: but he had rarely been out of the country wherein
his mother bore him; and where another nabob might have dreamed of an
earl, or even have soared aspiringly in imagination toward a
marchioness-ship for his only child, old Stapylton retained unshaken
faith in the dust-gathering creed of his youth.

He had tolerated Pevensey, had indeed been prepared to purchase him much
as he would have ordered