All this, perhaps, might be easier to support if life were not so cruelly ironical. That morning Edgar, who felt his own position untenable, and whose future seemed to be cut off under his feet--who felt himself to be standing muffled and invisible between two suffering women, each with the strongest claim upon him, for whom he could do nothing--was carried off to assist in getting up an entertainment at Mr. Tottenham’s shop. Entertainments, in the evening--duets, pieces on the cornet, Trial Scene from Pickwick; and in the morning, lectures, the improvement of Lady Mary Tottenham’s mind, and the grand office of teaching the young ladies of Harbour Green to think! What a farce it all seemed! And what an insignificant farce all the lighter external circumstances of life always seem to the compulsory actors in them, who have, simultaneously, the tragedy or even genteel comedy of their own lives going on, and all its most critical threads running through the larger lighter foolish web which concerns only the outside of man. The actor who has to act, and the singer who has to sing, and the romancist who has to go on weaving his romance through all the personal miseries of their existence, is scarcely more to be pitied than those unprofessional sufferers who do much the same thing, without making any claim, or supposing themselves to have any right to our sympathy. Edgar was even half glad to go, to get himself out of the quiet, and out of hearing of the broken bits of talk which went on around him; but I do not think that he was disposed to look with a very favourable eye on the entertainment at Tottenham’s, or even on the benevolent whimsey of the owner of that enormous shop. CHAPTER III. Harry. Harry Thornleigh was anything but content to be left alone at Tottenham’s. He proposed that he should accompany Edgar and Mr. Tottenham, but the latter personage, benevolent as he was, had the faculty of saying No, and declined his nephew’s company. Then he wandered all about the place, looked at the house, inspected the dogs, strolled about the plantations, everything a poor young man could do to abridge the time till luncheon. He took Phil with him, and Phil chattered eternally of Mr. Earnshaw. “I wish you wouldn’t call him by that objectionable name,” said Harry. “It’s a capital good name,” cried Phil. “I wish you could see their blazon, in Gwillim. Earnshaw says it ain’t his family; but everybody says he’s a great swell in disguise, and I feel sure he is.” “Hallo!” said Harry, idly, “what put that into your head? It’s all the other way, my fine fellow.” “I don’t know what you mean by the other way. His name wasn’t always Earnshaw,” said Phil, triumphantly. “They’ve got about half a hundred quarterings, real old gentry, not upstarts like us.” “That’s admirable,” said Harry. “I suppose that’s what you study all the time you are shut up together, eh?”