'You should be. Not that I mean to say that luck lies in any one place
long, or at any one person's door. Fortune likes new faces, and your
wisdom lies in bringing your acquisitions into safety while her favour
lasts. To do that you must make friends in her time of smiles--make
friends with people, wherever you find them. My daughter has
unconsciously followed that maxim. She has struck up a warm friendship
with our neighbour, Miss Power, at the castle. We are diametrically
different from her in associations, traditions, ideas, religion--she
comes of a violent dissenting family among other things--but I say to
Charlotte what I say to you: win affection and regard wherever you can,
and accommodate yourself to the times. I put nothing in the way of their
intimacy, and wisely so, for by this so many pleasant hours are added to
the sum total vouchsafed to humanity.'

It was quite late in the afternoon when Somerset took his leave. Miss
De Stancy did not return to the castle that night, and he walked through
the wood as he had come, feeling that he had been talking with a man
of simple nature, who flattered his own understanding by devising
Machiavellian theories after the event, to account for any spontaneous
action of himself or his daughter, which might otherwise seem eccentric
or irregular.

Before Somerset reached the inn he was overtaken by a slight shower, and
on entering the house he walked into the general room, where there was a
fire, and stood with one foot on the fender. The landlord was talking to
some guest who sat behind a screen; and, probably because Somerset
had been seen passing the window, and was known to be sketching at the
castle, the conversation turned on Sir William De Stancy.

'I have often noticed,' observed the landlord, 'that volks who have come
to grief, and quite failed, have the rules how to succeed in life more
at their vingers' ends than volks who have succeeded. I assure you that
Sir William, so full as he is of wise maxims, never acted upon a wise
maxim in his life, until he had lost everything, and it didn't matter
whether he was wise or no. You know what he was in his young days, of
course?'

'No, I don't,' said the invisible stranger.

'O, I thought everybody knew poor Sir William's history. He was the
star, as I may zay, of good company forty years ago. I remember him in
the height of his jinks, as I used to zee him when I was a very little
boy, and think how great and wonderful