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with a volume of sermons open on the table before him. But neither the accounts, nor the magazines, nor the sermons, could arrest his attention for a moment. He had staked everything on obtaining a certain object, and that object was now beyond his reach. Men fail often in other things, in the pursuit of honour, fortune, or power, and when they fail they can begin again. There was no beginning again for him. When Mary Lowther should have married this captain, she would be a thing lost to him for ever;--and was she not as bad as married to this man already? He could do nothing to stop her marriage. Early in the afternoon of Monday the Rev. Henry Fitzackerley Chamberlaine reached Hampton Privets. He came with his own carriage and a pair of post-horses, as befitted a prebendary of the good old times. Not that Mr. Chamberlaine was a very old man, but that it suited his tastes and tone of mind to adhere to the well-bred ceremonies of life, so many of which went out of fashion when railroads came in. Mr. Chamberlaine was a gentleman of about fifty-five years of age, unmarried, possessed of a comfortable private independence, the incumbent of a living in the fens of Cambridgeshire, which he never visited,--his health forbidding him to do so,--on which subject there had been a considerable amount of correspondence between him and a certain right rev. prelate, in which the prebendary had so far got the better in the argument as not to be disturbed in his manner of life; and he was, as has been before said, the owner of a stall in Salisbury Cathedral. His lines had certainly fallen to him in very pleasant places. As to that living in the fens, there was not much to prick his conscience, as he gave up the parsonage house and two-thirds of the income to his curate, expending the other third on local charities. Perhaps the argument which had most weight in silencing the bishop was contained in a short postscript to one of his letters. "By-the-by," said the postscript, "perhaps I ought to inform your lordship that I have never drawn a penny of income out of Hardbedloe since I ceased to live there." "It's a bishop's living," said the happy holder of it, "to one or two clerical friends, and Dr. ---- thinks the patronage would be better in his hands than in mine. I disagree with him, and he'll have to write a great many letters before he succeeds." But his stall was worth L800 a year and a house, and Mr. Chamberlaine, in regard to hi
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