“Your father's son should know that where a Barrington lived he had a home,--not to say you have already paid some of the tribute of this homeliness, and seen me very cross and ill-tempered. Well, let us not speak of that now. I have your word to remain here.” And she left him to attend to her household cares, while he strolled into the garden, half amused, half embarrassed by all the strange and new interests that had grown up so suddenly around him. CHAPTER XV. AN EXPLORING EXPEDITION Whether from simple caprice, or that Lady Cobham desired to mark her disapprobation of Polly Dill's share in the late wager, is not open to me to say, but the festivities at Cob-ham were not, on that day, graced or enlivened by her presence. If the comments on her absence were brief, they were pungent, and some wise reflections, too, were uttered as to the dangers that must inevitably attend all attempts to lift people into a sphere above their own. Poor human nature! that unlucky culprit who is flogged for everything and for everybody, bore the brunt of these severities, and it was declared that Polly had done what any other girl “in her rank of life” might have done; and this being settled, the company went to luncheon, their appetites none the worse for the small _auto-da-fé_ they had just celebrated. “You'd have lost your money, Captain,” whispered Ambrose Bushe to Stapylton, as they stood talking together in a window recess, “if that girl had only taken the river three hundred yards higher up. Even as it was, she 'd have breasted her horse at the bank if the bridle had not given way. I suppose you have seen the place?” “I regret to say I have not. They tell me it's one of the strongest rapids in the river.” “Let me describe it to you,” replied he; and at once set about a picture in which certainly no elements of peril were forgotten, and all the dangers of rocks and rapids were given with due emphasis. Stapylton seemed to listen with fitting attention, throwing out the suitable “Indeed! is it possible!” and such-like interjections, his mind, however, by no means absorbed by the narrative, but dwelling solely on a chance name that had dropped from the narrator. “You called the place 'Barrington's Ford,'” said he, at last. “Who is Barrington?” “As good a gentleman by blood and descent as any in this room, but now reduced to keep a little wayside inn,--the 'Fisherman's Home,' it is called. All come of a spendthrift son, who went out to India, and ran through every acre of the property before he died.” “What a strange vicissitude! And is the old man much broken by it?”