He had married early, and had made, in the estimation of his friends and of the county generally, an excellent choice of a wife in the person of the eldest daughter of a neighbouring squire. The marriage was apparently a very happy one; for the bride brought her husband a fair face, a loving heart, and a good fortune, and entertained his friends with due courtesy and cordiality. Moreover, she neither thwarted his tastes nor squandered his money; while he, on his part, pursued his hunting, shooting, and fishing, and his occasional magisterial duties, with due consideration for his wife's domestic and social engagements, so that their married life ran its course with as little friction or creaking as could reasonably be expected. Then there came, in due time, the children: first, a little girl, the object of her mother's passionate love, and as dear to her father as the mistake of her not having been a boy would allow her to be; then, after an interval of three years, came a son. Now it so happened that at the time of this son's birth there was residing as a guest at the Manor-house a middle-aged gentleman reputed to be very rich. His name was Amos Sutterby. Mr Huntingdon had met him abroad in the second year after his marriage when taking a tour in Switzerland with his wife. Mr Sutterby was an old bachelor, rather bluff in his manners, but evidently in easy circumstances. The Huntingdons and himself had met on the Rigi, and the squire had taken to him at once--in a great measure, it may be, because Mr Amos was a good listener, and was very ready to ask Mr Huntingdon's opinion and advice. So the squire gave his new acquaintance a general invitation to Flixworth Manor, which the other cordially accepted: and in a little while this acquaintanceship ripened into a steady friendship, though by no means entirely to the satisfaction of Mrs Huntingdon. The result, however, was that Mr Sutterby spent several weeks of every year, at the close of the summer and beginning of the autumn, at the Manor, and was the constant companion of the squire in his field-sports. Mr Huntingdon had taken care to satisfy himself that his new friend, though somewhat of an oddity, was a man of substance. True, he was only living in bachelor style, and possessed no landed property; but then he was able at all times to command ready money, and was reputed by persons who had long known him to be the holder of a large amount in the funds, an impression which seemed to be justified by some elegant and costly presents of which Mr Sutterby begged his friend's acceptance, as a token of his esteem and a mark of his appreciation of that kind hospitality which, as he said, an eccentric old bachelor living in lodgings in London was unable to return in kind.