become of his love, that the young man set off straight for Metz in hot haste, and did not let the grass grow under his feet, until he had made Aimée his wife. All this had occurred the previous autumn, and Roger did not know of the step his brother had taken until it was irrevocable. Then came the mother’s death, which, besides the simplicity of its own overwhelming sorrow, brought with it the loss of the kind, tender mediatrix, who could always soften and turn his father’s heart. It is doubtful, however, if even she could have succeeded in this; for the Squire looked high, and overhigh, for the wife of his heir; he detested all foreigners, and moreover held all Roman Catholics in a dread and abomination something akin to our ancestors’ hatred of witchcraft. All these prejudices were strengthened by his grief. Argument would always have glanced harmless away off his shield of utter unreason; but a loving impulse, in a happy moment, might have softened his heart to what he most detested in the former days. But the happy moments came not now, and the loving impulses were trodden down by the bitterness of his frequent remorse, not less than by his growing irritability; so Aimée lived on solitary in the little cottage near Winchester in which Osborne had installed her, when she first came to England as his wife, and in the dainty furnishing of which he had run himself so deeply into debt. For Osborne consulted his own fastidious taste in his purchases rather than her simple childlike wishes and wants, and looked upon the little Frenchwoman rather as the future mistress of Hamley Hall, than as the wife of a man who was wholly dependent on others at present. He had chosen a southern county as being far removed from those midland shires where the name of Hamley of Hamley was well and widely known; for he did not wish his wife to assume, if only for a time, a name which was not justly and legally her own. In all these arrangements he had willingly striven to do his full duty by her; and she repaid him with passionate devotion and admiring reverence. If his vanity had met with a check, or his worthy desires for college honours had been disappointed, he knew where to go for a comforter; one who poured out praise, till her words were choked in her throat by the rapidity of her thoughts, and who emptied the small vials of her indignation on every one who did not acknowledge and bow down to her husband’s merits. If she ever wished to go to the château—that was his home— and to be introduced to his family, Aimée never hinted a word of it to him. Only, she did yearn, and she did plead, for a little more of her husband’s company; and the good reasons which had convinced her of the necessity of his being so much away, when he was present to urge them, failed in their efficacy, when she tried to reproduce them to herself in his absence.

The afternoon of the day on which Lord Hollingford called, Roger was going upstairs, three steps at a time, when, at a turn of the landing, he encountered his father. It was the first time he had seen him since their conversation about the Towers invitation to dinner. The Squire stopped his son, by standing right in the middle of the passage.

“Thou’rt going to meet the mounseer, my lad?” said he, half as affirmation, half as question.

“No, sir; I sent off James almost immediately with a note declining the invitation. I don’t care about it—that’s to say, not to signify.”

“Why did you take me up so sharp, Roger?” said his father pettishly. “You all take me up so hastily, now-a-days. I think it hard that a man mustn’t be allowed a bit of crossness, when he’s tired and heavy at heart—that I do.”

“But, father, I should never like to go to a house where they had slighted you.”

“Nay, nay, lad,” said the Squire, brightening up a little; “I think I slighted them. They asked me to dinner, after my lord was made Lieutenant, time after time; but I never would go near ’em. I call that my slighting them.”

And no more was said at the time; but the next day the Squire again stopped Roger.

“I’ve been making Jem try on his livery-coat that he hasn’t worn this three or four years—he’s got too stout for it now.”