Then through the wet cobwebs, that hung like movable diaphragms on each

blade and bough, he pushed his way down to the furrow which led from the

secluded fir-tree island to the wide world beyond the field.

He was not a stranger to enterprise, and still less to the contemplation

of enterprise; but an enterprise such as this he had never even outlined.

That his dear lady was troubled at the situation he had placed her in by

not going himself on that errand, he could see from her letter; but,

believing an immediate marriage with her to be the true way of restoring

to both that equanimity necessary to serene philosophy, he held it of

little account how the marriage was brought about, and happily began his

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journey towards her place of sojourn.

He passed through a little copse before leaving the parish, the smoke

from newly lit fires rising like the stems of blue trees out of the few

cottage chimneys. Here he heard a quick, familiar footstep in the path

ahead of him, and, turning the corner of the bushes, confronted the foot-

post on his way to Welland. In answer to St. Cleeve's inquiry if there

was anything for himself the postman handed out one letter, and proceeded

on his route.

Swithin opened and read the letter as he walked, till it brought him to a

standstill by the importance of its contents.

They were enough to agitate a more phlegmatic youth than he. He leant

over the wicket which came in his path, and endeavoured to comprehend the

sense of the whole.

The large long envelope contained, first, a letter from a solicitor in a

northern town, informing him that his paternal great-uncle, who had

recently returned from the Cape (whither he had gone in an attempt to

repair a broken constitution), was now dead and buried. This

great-uncle's name was like a new creation to Swithin. He had held no

communication with the young man's branch of the family for innumerable

years,--never, in fact, since the marriage of Swithin's father with the

simple daughter of Welland Farm. He had been a bachelor to the end of

his life, and had amassed a fairly good professional fortune by a long

and extensive medical practice in the smoky, dreary, manufacturing town

in which he had lived and died. Swithin had always been taught to think

of him as the embodiment of all that was unpleasant in man. He was

narrow, sarcastic, and shrewd to unseemliness. That very shrewdness had

enabled him, without much professional profundity, to establish his large

and lucrative connexion, which lay almost entirely among a class who

neither looked nor cared for drawing-room courtesies.




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