to a
word against him."

"She calls him a model, and a blessed martyr"--Mrs. Twemlow was smiling
at the thought of it; "and she says she is a woman of great penetration,
and never will listen to anything. But it only shows what I have always
said, that our family has a peculiar power, a sort of attraction, a
superior gift of knowledge of their own minds, which makes them--But
there, you are laughing at me, Joshua!"

"Not I; but smiling at my own good fortune, that ever I get my own
way at all. But, Maria, you are right; your family has always
been distinguished for having its own way--a masterful race, and a
mistressful. And so much the more do the rest of mankind grow eager to
know all about them. In an ordinary mind, such as mine, that feeling
becomes at last irresistible; and finding no other way to gratify it,
I resolved to take the bull by the horns, or rather by the tail, this
morning. The poor old castle has been breaking up most grievously, even
within the last twenty years, and you, who have played as a child among
the ruins of the ramparts, would scarcely know them now. You cannot bear
to go there, which is natural enough, after all the sad things that have
happened; but if you did, you would be surprised, Maria; and I believe a
great part has been knocked down on purpose. But you remember the little
way in from the copse, where you and I, five-and-thirty years ago--"

"Of course I do, darling. It seems but yesterday; and I have a flower
now which you gathered for me there. It grew at a very giddy height upon
the wall, full of cracks and places where the evening-star came through;
but up you went, like a rocket or a race-horse; and what a fright I was
in, until you came down safe! I think that must have made up my mind to
have nobody except my Joshua."

"Well, my dear, you might have done much worse. But I happened to think
of that way in, this morning, when you put up your elbow, as you made
the tea, exactly as you used to do when I might come up there. And that
set me thinking of a quantity of things, and among them this plan which
I resolved to carry out. I took the trouble first to be sure that Caryl
was down here for the day, under the roof of Widow Shanks; and then I
set off by the road up the hill, for the stronghold of all the Carnes.
Without further peril than the fight with the pony, and the strange
apparition of Cheeseman about half a mile from the back entrance, I came
to the copse where the vi