The reception of this letter was, as may be supposed, a great blow to the Squire. But it filled him with rage rather than with grief; and after two or three hours’ consideration, he determined on the immediate and condign punishment of the offender who had brought disgrace upon the Family. A son of _his_ not a fit companion for _anyone_! Here was the sting. A member of the ancient Family of Manwaring not fit to associate with the son of a _parvenu_ like Lord Guttleborough! Here was the disgrace! In his self-conceit, so convinced was he that no one would venture to attempt to deceive him, that it never even entered into his head to weigh the evidence of the alleged crime; nor in all that he did, and in all that he determined to do, did the father once think of the moral wickedness of the act which he believed his own son to have committed. All he thought of, and all he thought of punishing him for, was, not the sin committed against God and man, but the offence committed against the House of Manwaring. Pride of ancestry, which, kept within due bounds and rightly regulated, might to some be an incentive to good and to noble action--_Noblesse oblige_--became, in the case of the Squire of Holmcastle, the parent of evil in its effects, as well as a positive crime in itself. The desire of retribution made the old man blind. In his rage and wounded pride, he forgot what he had once forgotten before, that the acres of his much-loved Holmcastle were entailed upon the son he was about to cast out like a dog upon the world, and that if his son Lionel should die without issue, the castaway, should he survive, would come to reign in his own stead at the Manor.