vernor was quite prepared to receive an order for the liberation of
his prisoner.

He did not dare to go to Robert Bolton's office, but he did call at the
bank. 'We have heard nothing about it, Mr. Babington,' said the old
clerk over the counter. But then the old clerk added in a whisper, 'None
of the family take to the news, sir; but everybody else seems to think
there is a great deal in it. If he didn't marry her I suppose he ought
to be let out.'

'I should think he ought,' said the squire, indignantly as he left the
bank.

Thus fortified by what he considered to be the general voice of
Cambridge, he returned the same evening to Babington. Cambridge,
including Mr. Caldigate, had been unanimous in believing the report. And
if the report were true, then, certainly, was his nephew innocent. As he
thought of this, some appropriate idea of the injustice of the evil done
to the man and to the man's wife came upon him. If such were the
treatment to which he and she had been subjected,--if he, innocent, had
been torn away from her and sent to the common jail, and if she,
certainly innocent, had been wrongly deprived for a time of the name
which he had honestly given her,--then would it not have been right to
open to her the hearts and the doors at Babington during the period of
her great distress? As he thought of this he was so melted by ruth that
a tear came into each of his old eyes. Then he remembered the attempt
which had been made to catch this man for Julia--as to which he
certainly had been innocent,--and his daughter's continued wrath. That a
woman should be wrathful in such a matter was natural to him. He
conceived that it behoved a woman to be weak, irascible, affectionate,
irrational, and soft-hearted. When Julia would be loud in condemnation
of her cousin, and would pretend to commiserate the woes of the poor
wife who had been left in Australia, though he knew the source of these
feelings, he could not be in the least angry with her. But that was not
at all the state of his mind in reference to his son-in-law Augustus
Smirkie. Sometimes, as he had heard Mr. Smirkie inveigh against the
enormity of bigamy and of this bigamist in particular, he had determined
that some 'odd-come-shortly,' as he would call it, he would give the
vicar of Plum-cum-Pippins a moral pat on the head which should silence
him for a time. At the present moment when he got into his carriage at
the station to be taken home, he was not sure