Miss Carew, averse to the anomalous relations of courtship, made as little delay as possible in getting married. Cashel’s luck was not changed by the event. Bingley Byron died three weeks after the ceremony (which was civic and private); and Cashel had to claim possession of the property in Dorsetshire, in spite of his expressed wish that the lawyers would take themselves and the property to the devil, and allow him to enjoy his honeymoon in peace. The transfer was not, however, accomplished at once. Owing to his mother’s capricious reluctance to give the necessary information without reserve, and to the law’s delay, his first child was born some time before his succession was fully established and the doors of his ancestral hall opened to him. The conclusion of the business was a great relief to his attorneys, who had been unable to shake his conviction that the case was clear enough, but that the referee had been squared. By this he meant that the Lord Chancellor had been bribed to keep him out of his property. His marriage proved an unusually happy one. To make up for the loss of his occupation, he farmed, and lost six thousand pounds by it; tried gardening with better success; began to meddle in commercial enterprises, and became director of several trading companies in the city; and was eventually invited to represent a Dorsetshire constituency in Parliament in the Radical interest. He was returned by a large majority; and, having a loud voice and an easy manner, he soon acquired some reputation both in and out of the House of Commons by the popularity of his own views, and the extent of his wife’s information, which he retailed at second hand. He made his maiden speech in the House unabashed the first night he sat there. Indeed, he was afraid of nothing except burglars, big dogs, doctors, dentists, and street-crossings. Whenever any accident occurred through any of these he preserved the newspaper in which it was reported, read it to Lydia very seriously, and repeated his favorite assertion that the only place in which a man was safe was the ring. As he objected to most field sports on the ground of inhumanity, she, fearing that he would suffer in health and appearance from want of systematic exercise, suggested that he should resume the practice of boxing with gloves. But he was lazy in this matter, and had a prejudice that boxing did not become a married man. His career as a pugilist was closed by his marriage.