Joining in the eager table-talk it had all excited, with a mind at rest, the baronet could fully share the pleasure of home-thoughts: the very atmosphere of the room seemed English, for all its bare waxed floor and patch of carpet, its airy paper-hangings of pastoral scenes, its light curtains and tall glaring windows with flimsy frames, its stove-filled chimney-place, and the white folding-doors of its antechamber, about all which there lurked no corner of substantial comfort, as round the wainscot and panelling, the recesses and embayments, corner-cupboards, and hearth-places, and presses of home, with its high-backed arm-chair, noiseless floors, and family pictures: the sound of the convent-bell, and Sir Godfrey’s account of his pretty little _quêteuse_, alone brought back their recollection. It had been long since Lady Willoughby saw her husband so cheerful, even when he turned to his newspaper, and sat absorbed in its varied matter, leaning back on that hard diminutive sofa;—Mrs Mason, as her custom was, has withdrawn to the mysterious privacy of her own apartment; Mr Thorpe, to a book, apart in the wide naked antechamber; while at its further windows, looking out, sit the two young people in their unwearied charge of the street;—till, as that after-dinner repose steals through the sitting-room, with cool shade from the early May twilight, she feels instinctively that his old easy habit of middle age has returned on him, the first time since reaching France—nay, on second thought, since the day of that melancholy message from Devonshire—of sinking at that hour into a doze. It scarce needs her turning her head, to see how the affairs and concerns of the world at large have fallen from his mind; while gently netting on, without word or other motion, perhaps with no particular thought besides, she sits quiet that it may last the longer. It had seemed vague, in its connection with a trifle; but neither she nor he could have told the indescribable relief it had given him to find the only singularity in Sir John’s memoranda cleared up; in this commonplace way, too, when even casual circumstances had seemed joining to give it a feverish importance. That intended but ineffectual will of his, by which he had evidently contemplated a formal bequest, with those slight exceptions, of everything to the colonel, already his legal heir, could after all have had no rational motive; it was probably but one of those strangely groundless suspicions, those longings to exercise influence from the very tomb, which cross an unsound mind. The colonel had not been unconscious of the superior abilities of his eldest brother, nor of the still brighter parts which were attributed to his brother John in early life; he only felt reassured by the conviction, again confirmed, that the unhappy results of his foolish match had been such as to touch his brain with insanity. There was a vulgar old story about their family, in