ou are a pretty fellow, Mr. Mowbray of St. Ronan's--you
are one of the happy sheep that go out for wool, and come home shorn.
Egad, you think yourself a millstone, and turn out a sack of grain--You
flew abroad a hawk, and have come home a pigeon--You snarled at the
Philistines, and they have drawn your eye-teeth with a vengeance!"

"This is all very witty, Mr. Touchwood," replied Mowbray; "but wit will
not pay this man Etherington, or whatever he is, so many hundreds as I
have lost to him."

"Why, then, wealth must do what wit cannot," said old Touchwood; "I must
advance for you, that is all. Look ye, sir, I do not go afoot for
nothing--if I have laboured, I have reaped--and, like the fellow in the
old play, 'I have enough, and can maintain my humour'--it is not a few
hundreds, or thousands either, can stand betwixt old P. S. Touchwood and
his purpose; and my present purpose is to make you, Mr. Mowbray of St.
Ronan's, a free man of the forest.--You still look grave on it, young
man?--Why, I trust you are not such an ass as to think your dignity
offended, because the plebeian Scrogie comes to the assistance of the
terribly great and old house of Mowbray?"

"I am indeed not such a fool," answered Mowbray, with his eyes still
bent on the ground, "to reject assistance that comes to me like a rope
to a drowning man--but there is a circumstance"----he stopped short and
drank a glass of wine--"a circumstance to which it is most painful to me
to allude--but you seem my friend--and I cannot intimate to you more
strongly my belief in your professions of regard than by saying, that
the language held by Lady Penelope Penfeather on my sister's account,
renders it highly proper that she were settled in life; and I cannot but
fear, that the breaking off the affair with this man might be of great
prejudice to her at this moment. They will have Nettlewood, and they may
live separate--he has offered to make settlements to that effect, even
on the very day of marriage. Her condition as a married woman will put
her above scandal, and above necessity, from which, I am sorry to say, I
cannot hope long to preserve her."

"For shame!--for shame!--for shame!" said Touchwood, accumulating his
words thicker than usual on each other; "would you sell your own flesh
and blood to a man like this Bulmer, whose character is now laid before
you, merely because a disappointed old maid speaks scandal of her? A
fine veneration you pay to the honoured na