The Willoughby family, as has been already said, left England for the Continent; and the spring which succeeded Sir John’s death found them temporarily residing in Paris. It was very far from the Colonel’s intention, however, to remain there long; the household was only incomplete, as yet, without Francis, who in a few weeks would join it on leaving Oxford; and there had to be some consideration before finally settling, from among no slight variety of advertisements in the public journals, what district of the provinces might be best suited for a retreat, probably during some years. One or two points of business, also, requiring attention to his English letters, continued to make their early arrival a convenience; not so much from the Devonshire lawyer, whose methodical regularity left nothing to desire, as with regard to the sale of Sir Godfrey’s commission, and some arrangements left unfinished in town, of that tedious nature which characterises stockbroking. Meanwhile their establishment was certainly simple compared with that lately given up in Golden Square, where society, at no time deficient to the Willoughbies, had, since the Colonel’s last return home, been doubling itself every year, and had begun, since his brother’s death, absolutely to send visiting-cards by footmen, to call in carriages, to bespeak the earliest possible share of their company at dinner: contrasted with the extent which must have been necessary for Stoke, it was diminutive. Yet it was by no means one of a restricted kind, although the income from Lady Willoughby’s own small fortune would alone have sufficed to keep it up, leaving some surplus; so that, living as yet without new acquaintances, and, so far as their countrymen were concerned, in perfect obscurity, they had not a wish which it did not suffice for; as long, at least, as the vast, strange city held its first influences over them. To these, probably, it was owing that Colonel Willoughby appeared for some time to have had no other object in coming to Paris; if distinctly aware of any, beyond the facilities there for choosing a place of residence in the provinces, for awaiting his son Francis, and finishing the more important part of his correspondence, with the convenience of respectable banking-houses—besides the possibility of avoiding English acquaintances, which at Dieppe or Boulogne would not have been so easy—then he would without doubt have mentioned it to his wife. A reserved man, and in the strictest sense a proud one, he was amongst the last to have secrets; they would have sat on his brow, and troubled his manner; nor had he at any time had such a thing apart from _her_. During the whole course of their wedded life, whether together or separated, by word or letter, their mutual confidence had increased: for her part, she was of that easy, placid, seemingly almost torpid nature, which, save in a receipt of housekeeping, or a triumph of domestic management, appears merely to