"Money in the bank!" cried Sir John Slingsby, "was there ever such a girl? She has money in the bank! Well! take the carriage, Mary, when you like, and be back to breakfast at half-past nine, otherwise you shall have cold tea, and not a bit of pasty. Now to bed, to bed; for if people have to go to Tarningham early in the morning, they must go to bed at night." The breakfast-table was laid, as usual, by nine o'clock in the morning; but before that hour Isabella Slingsby had been down and had wandered about in the drawing-room and in the library with a nervous sort of unsettledness in her manner, which struck even the servants, who happened to pass. She looked out of almost every window in the house which was accessible to her; she gazed down every road that wound through the park; she scanned every moving figure, that was within the range of sight; and she felt every moment a terror of what the next would bring, which she had never experienced in life before. She wished that Mary had not left her, that they had sent some one for the money; and she conjured up difficulties and distresses, obstacles that she would not know how to meet, questions of law and form of which she was unaware, to trouble herself and agitate her mind still more. At length, with a bold resolution, she rang the bell, and ordered the servant, who appeared, to go down to Doctor Miles's, with her compliments, and say she would be glad to see him. The moment after her father entered the room as gay, as bustling, as jovial as ever; his face resplendent with small red veins; his eyes sparkling like the wine of the night before; his ample stomach rolling unrepressed under an easy waistcoat; and his stout legs and neat foot carrying him about with the light step of one-and-twenty. To have looked at him one would have thought that there was not such a thing as care or sorrow in the while world, much less in his own house. "Ah, Bella!" he cried, kissing her, "how have you slept, my love?--Where's Mary?--not come back? How's your aunt?--pining, pining, eh?--see what comes of a melancholy constitution, too much bile and twenty years' trial of a puritanical husband! Well, what's o'clock?--five-and-twenty minutes after nine--come along, we'll have breakfast. Mary shall have a fresh jot of tea when she comes," and in went Sir John Slingsby to the breakfast-room, ringing the bell as if he would have pulled it down the moment he got it. "Breakfast," he exclaimed, when the butler appeared; "has not the postbag come?" "No, Sir John," replied the man. "Very late," said the baronet; and, marching to the window, he looked out upon the sunshiny park, with his hands behind him, for want of better occupation.