naturally hated thinking; he hated trouble, and it was
troublesome to think. Perhaps it was more troublesome to him than to
other people; for, to confess the truth, he had not more than a very
ordinary allowance of brains, and those he had were not accustomed to
have sudden calls upon them. So he sat and pondered slowly, starting
from the one or two points which were clear to him, and trying, without
much success, to make out a map of the future from these slight
indications. First of all, if was clear and evident that he was engaged
to Lucia; he stopped a moment there to think of her, and that she was
certainly a prize in the lottery of life, so beautiful, gracious, and
devoted to him as she was; but he had not the smallest uncertainty
about Mrs. Costello's consent, so never glanced towards any possible
missing of the prize. That was all very well, _very_ well, at present,
though undeniably it would have been better if Lucia could have had Lady
Adeliza's advantages. Ah! that was the next step. There was Lady Adeliza
to be got rid of--if she did not herself, take the initiative--and that
was not a pleasant affair. He had only been extremely attentive to her,
that was the utmost anybody could say; but then there was his
father--the two fathers, indeed, for he had good reason to believe that
the Earl had not urged him to pay his suit to the lady without pretty
good cause for counting on the approval of her family. It was a dreadful
bore; and then there could be no doubt that by displeasing at a blow his
own father and Lady Adeliza's, he was forfeiting his best if not his
only chance of success in life. Altogether, the more he looked at the
prospect the gloomier it grew, and at last he got up impatiently and put
an end to his cogitations.

"I shall have to turn backwoodsman at once," he said to himself, "or
miner, like those fellows we saw at the Sault."

In spite of his confidence in himself and in Lucia, it was not without a
little tremor that Mr. Percy walked up to the Cottage next morning. He
began to feel that there really might be some difficulty in persuading a
mother to give up her only child to the care of a man who was not only
poor, but likely to remain so, who could not even give her the hope of
independence such as might fall to the lot of the backwoodsman or miner.
But he kept up his courage as well as he could, and was very little
disturbed out of his usual manner when he followed Margery into the
small par