s the heiress to all the
Scatcherd property!"

"Oh, heavens! Mr Gresham."

"Yes, indeed," continued the squire. "So it is; it is very, very--"
But Lady Arabella had fainted. She was a woman who generally had her
feelings and her emotions much under her own control; but what she
now heard was too much for her. When she came to her senses, the
first words that escaped her lips were, "Dear Mary!"

But the household had to sleep on the news before it could be fully
realised. The squire was not by nature a mercenary man. If I have at
all succeeded in putting his character before the reader, he will be
recognised as one not over attached to money for money's sake. But
things had gone so hard with him, the world had become so rough, so
ungracious, so full of thorns, the want of means had become an evil
so keenly felt in every hour, that it cannot be wondered at that his
dreams that night should be of a golden elysium. The wealth was not
coming to him. True. But his chief sorrow had been for his son. Now
that son would be his only creditor. It was as though mountains of
marble had been taken from off his bosom.

But Lady Arabella's dreams flew away at once into the seventh heaven.
Sordid as they certainly were, they were not absolutely selfish.
Frank would now certainly be the first commoner in Barsetshire; of
course he would represent the county; of course there would be the
house in town; it wouldn't be her house, but she was contented that
the grandeur should be that of her child. He would have heaven
knows what to spend per annum. And that it should come through Mary
Thorne! What a blessing she had allowed Mary to be brought into the
Greshamsbury nursery! Dear Mary!

"She will of course be one now," said Beatrice to her sister. With
her, at the present moment, "one" of course meant one of the bevy
that was to attend her at the altar. "Oh dear! how nice! I shan't
know what to say to her to-morrow. But I know one thing."

"What is that?" asked Augusta.

"She will be as mild and as meek as a little dove. If she and the
doctor had lost every shilling in the world, she would have been as
proud as an eagle." It must be acknowledged that Beatrice had had the
wit to read Mary's character aright.

But Augusta was not quite pleased with the whole affair. Not that
she begrudged her brother his luck, or Mary her happiness. But her
ideas of right and wrong--perhaps we should rather say Lady Amelia's
ideas--would not be fairly