In another minute, Mr. Longstaff, Bill the constable, and his assistant, were the only living creatures beneath that roof, which, an hour before, with all its poverty, seemed to offer as secure a home, as inviolable a hearth stone, as the castle of the best lordling in the kingdom. CHAPTER V. _Introduces to the reader two new characters of considerable importance, and describes a scene between them to which a very peculiar interest is attached._ Amongst all those who were most materially concerned in the circumstances detailed in the preceding chapters, I must now name one person who has hitherto only been once passingly alluded to in the most brief manner, but whose happiness was (if not more) at least as deeply involved in the events which had taken place as was that of any other individual whatever, not excepting even our hero's mother herself. That person--for Mr. Longstaff has already hinted that his master was married--was Squire Lupton's wife. Should the acute reader's moral or religious sensibilities be shocked at the discovery of so much human depravity, as this avowal must necessarily uncurtain to him, it is to be hoped he will lay the blame thereof upon the right shoulders, and not rashly attack the compiler of this history, who does only as Josephus, Tacitus, and other great historians have done before him,--make use of the materials which other men's actions prepare ready to his hands, and with the good or evil of which he himself is no more chargeable, than is the obedient workman who mouldeth a vessel with clay of the quality which his master may please to put before him. During a period of some weeks prior to the time at which our story commences, Mrs. Lupton had been upon a visit to the family of Mr. Shirley, a resident in York, with whom she was intimately acquainted previously to her marriage with the heir of Kiddal House. Owing, however, to circumstances of a family nature, with which she had early become acquainted after her destiny had been for ever united with that of Mr. Lupton, she had hitherto found it impossible to introduce to her own house, with any degree of pleasure to herself, even the dearest companions of her youth; and no one was more so, for they had known each other from girlhood, than Miss Mary Shirley, the only daughter of her esteemed friend. Like many others in similar circumstances, she long strove to hide her own unhappiness from the world; but, in doing so, had been too often compelled to violate the most cherished feelings of her bosom; and--when at home--had chosen to remain like a recluse in her own house, when otherwise she would gladly have had some one with whom to commune when grief pressed heavily upon her; and he who had sworn to be all in all to her was in reality the cause, instead of the allayer, of her sorrows.