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