tion out of Brooke!"

"Cadwallader might talk to him."

"Not he! Humphrey finds everybody charming. I never can get him to
abuse Casaubon. He will even speak well of the bishop, though I tell
him it is unnatural in a beneficed clergyman; what can one do with a
husband who attends so little to the decencies? I hide it as well as I
can by abusing everybody myself. Come, come, cheer up! you are well
rid of Miss Brooke, a girl who would have been requiring you to see the
stars by daylight. Between ourselves, little Celia is worth two of
her, and likely after all to be the better match. For this marriage to
Casaubon is as good as going to a nunnery."

"Oh, on my own account--it is for Miss Brooke's sake I think her
friends should try to use their influence."

"Well, Humphrey doesn't know yet. But when I tell him, you may depend
on it he will say, 'Why not? Casaubon is a good fellow--and
young--young enough.' These charitable people never know vinegar from
wine till they have swallowed it and got the colic. However, if I were
a man I should prefer Celia, especially when Dorothea was gone. The
truth is, you have been courting one and have won the other. I can see
that she admires you almost as much as a man expects to be admired. If
it were any one but me who said so, you might think it exaggeration.
Good-by!"

Sir James handed Mrs. Cadwallader to the phaeton, and then jumped on
his horse. He was not going to renounce his ride because of his
friend's unpleasant news--only to ride the faster in some other
direction than that of Tipton Grange.

Now, why on earth should Mrs. Cadwallader have been at all busy about
Miss Brooke's marriage; and why, when one match that she liked to think
she had a hand in was frustrated, should she have straightway contrived
the preliminaries of another? Was there any ingenious plot, any
hide-and-seek course of action, which might be detected by a careful
telescopic watch? Not at all: a telescope might have swept the
parishes of Tipton and Freshitt, the whole area visited by Mrs.
Cadwallader in her phaeton, without witnessing any interview that could
excite suspicion, or any scene from which she did not return with the
same unperturbed keenness of eye and the same high natural color. In
fact, if that convenient vehicle had existed in the days of the Seven
Sages, one of them would doubtless have remarked, that you can know
little of women by following them about in their pony-