en two so bad as he is."

"Oh, grandfather, if he has offended you, you should try to forgive
him."

"Try to forgive him! How often have I forgiven him without any
trying? Why did he come down here the other day, and insult me for
the last time? Why didn't he keep away, as I had bidden him?"

"But you gave him leave to see you, sir."

"I didn't give him leave to treat me like that. Never mind; he will
find that, old as I am, I can punish an insult."

"You haven't done anything, sir, to injure him?" said Kate.

"I have made another will, that's all. Do you suppose I had that man
here all the way from Penrith for nothing?"

"But it isn't done yet?"

"I tell you it is done. If I left him the whole property it would be
gone in two years' time. What's the use of doing it?"

"But for his life, sir! You had promised him that he should have it
for his life."

"How dare you tell me that? I never promised him. As my heir, he
would have had it all, if he would have behaved himself with common
decency. Even though I disliked him, as I always have done, he should
have had it."

"And you have taken it from him altogether?"

"I shall answer no questions about it, Kate." Then a fit of coughing
came upon him, his four glasses of wine having been all taken, and
there was no further talk about business. During the evening Kate
read a chapter of the Bible out loud. But the Squire was very
impatient under the reading, and positively refused permission for
a second. "There isn't any good in so much of it, all at once," he
said, using almost exactly the same words which Kate had used to him
about the port wine. There may have been good produced by the small
quantity to which he listened, as there is good from the physic which
children take with wry faces, most unwillingly. Who can say?

For many weeks past Kate had begged her uncle to allow the clergyman
of Vavasor to come to him; but he had positively declined. The vicar
was a young man to whom the living had lately been given by the
Chancellor, and he had commenced his career by giving instant offence
to the Squire. This vicar's predecessor had been an old man, almost
as old as the Squire himself, and had held the living for forty
years. He had been a Westmoreland man, had read the prayers and
preached his one Sunday sermon in a Westmoreland dialect, getting
through the whole operation rather within an hour and a quarter. He
had troubled none of his parishioners by much adv