ade no immediate answer. "Don't
you think I ought to answer it, mamma?"

"You can't want to write at once."

"In the afternoon would do."

"In the afternoon! Why should you be in so much hurry, Rachel? It
took him four or five days to write to you."

"Yes; but he was down in Northamptonshire on business. Besides he
hadn't any letter from me to answer. I shouldn't like him to think--"

"To think what, Rachel?"

"That I had forgotten him."

"Psha!"

"Or that I didn't treat his letter with respect."

"He won't think that. But I must turn it over in my mind; and I
believe I ought to ask somebody."

"Not Dolly," said Rachel, eagerly.

"No, not your sister. I will not ask her. But if you don't mind,
my dear, I'll take the young man's letter out to Mr. Comfort, and
consult him. I never felt myself so much in need of somebody to
advise me. Mr. Comfort is an old man, and you won't mind his seeing
the letter."

Rachel did mind it very much, but she had no means of saving herself
from her fate. She did not like the idea of having her love-letter
submitted to the clergyman of the parish. I do not know any young
lady who would have liked it. But bad as that was, it was preferable
to having the letter submitted to Mrs. Prime. And then she remembered
that Mr. Comfort had advised that she might go to the ball, and that
he was father to her friend Mrs. Butler Cornbury.

CHAPTER II.

ELECTIONEERING.

And now, in these days,--the days immediately following the departure
of Luke Rowan from Baslehurst,--the Tappitt family were constrained
to work very hard at the task of defaming the young man who had
lately been living with them in their house. They were constrained
to do this by the necessities of their position; and in doing so by
no means showed themselves to be such monsters of iniquity as the
readers of the story will feel themselves inclined to call them.
As for Tappitt himself, he certainly believed that Rowan was so
base a scoundrel that no evil words against him could be considered
as malicious or even unnecessary. Is it not good to denounce a
scoundrel? And if the rascality of any rascal be specially directed
against oneself and one's own wife and children, is it not a duty to
denounce that rascal, so that his rascality may be known and thus
made of no effect? When Tappitt declared in the reading-room at
the Dragon, and afterwards in the little room inside the bar at
the King's Head, and again to a c