sister.

'Yes, I heard about him. You can't help hearing about him in Cambridge
now. All the world is talking about him.'

'And what does all the world say?' asked Julia, flippantly. To this
question her father at first made no answer. 'Whatever the world may
say, I cannot alter my opinion,' continued Julia. 'I shall never be able
to look upon John Caldigate and Hester Bolton as man and wife in the
sight of God.'

'I might just as well take upon myself to say that I didn't look upon
you and Smirkie as man and wife in the sight of God.'

'Papa!' screamed the married daughter.

'Sir!' ejaculated the married son-in-law.

'My dear, that is a strange thing to say of your own child,' whispered
the mother.

'Most strange!' said Julia, lifting both her hands up in an agony.

'But it's true,' roared the squire. 'She says that, let the law say what
it may, these people are not to be regarded as man and wife.'

'Not by me,' said Julia.

'Who are you that you are to set up a tribunal of your own? And if you
judge of another couple in that way, why isn't some one to judge of you
after the same fashion?'

'There is the verdict,' said Mr. Smirkie. 'No verdict has pronounced me
a bigamist.'

'But it might for anything I know,' said the squire, angrily. 'Some
woman might come up in Plum-cum-Pippins and say you had married her
before your first wife.'

'Papa, you are very disagreeable,' said Julia.

'Why shouldn't there be a wicked lie told in one place as well as in
another? There has been a wicked lie told here; and when the lie is
proved to have been a lie, as plain as the nose on your face, he is to
tell me that he won't believe the young folk to be man and wife because
of an untrue verdict! I say they are man and wife;--as good a man and
wife as you and he;--and let me see who'll refuse to meet them as such
in my house?'

Mr. Smirkie had not, in truth, made the offensive remark. It had been
made by Mrs. Smirkie. But it had suited the squire to attribute it to
the clergyman. Mr. Smirkie was now put upon his mettle, and was obliged
either to agree or to disagree. He would have preferred the former, had
he not been somewhat in awe of his wife. As it was, he fell back upon
the indiscreet assertion which his father-in-law had made some time
back. 'I, at any rate, sir, have not had a verdict against me.'

'What does that signify?'

'A great deal, I should say. A verdict, no doubt, is human, and
therefore may be wron