there came a rejoinder, saying that Will Belton would
be at the Castle on the fifteenth of August. "They can do without me
for about ten days," he said in his postscript, writing in a familiar
tone, which did not seem to have been at all checked by the coldness
of his cousin's note,--"as our harvest will be late; but I must be
back for a week's work before the partridges."

"Heartless! quite heartless!" Mr. Amedroz said as he read this.
"Partridges! to talk of partridges at such a time as this!"

Clara, however, would not acknowledge that she agreed with her
father; but she could not altogether restrain a feeling on her own
part that her cousin's good humour towards her and Mr. Amedroz should
have been repressed by the tone of her letter to him. The man was to
come, however, and she would not judge of him until he was there.

In one house in the neighbourhood, and in only one, had Miss Amedroz
a friend with whom she was intimate; and as regarded even this single
friend, the intimacy was the effect rather of circumstances than of
real affection. She liked Mrs. Askerton, and saw her almost daily;
but she could hardly tell herself that she loved her neighbour.

In the little town of Belton, close to the church, there stood a
pretty, small house, called Belton Cottage. It was so near the church
that strangers always supposed it to be the parsonage; but the
rectory stood away out in the country, half a mile from the town,
on the road to Redicote, and was a large house, three stories high,
with grounds of its own, and very ugly. Here lived the old bachelor
rector, seventy years of age, given much to long absences when he
could achieve them, and never on good terms with his bishop. His two
curates lived at Redicote, where there was a second church. Belton
Cottage, which was occupied by Colonel Askerton and Mrs. Askerton,
was on the Amedroz property, and had been hired some two years since
by the Colonel, who was then a stranger in the country and altogether
unknown to the Belton people. But he had come there for shooting, and
therefore his coming had been understood. Even as long ago as two
years since, there had been neither use nor propriety in keeping the
shooting for the squire's son, and it had been let with the cottage
to Colonel Askerton. So Colonel Askerton had come there with his
wife, and no one in the neighbourhood had known anything about them.
Mr. Amedroz, with his daughter, had called upon them, and gradually