Mr. Henry Joscelyn came down stairs at nine o’clock to breakfast as he always did. No clock was ever more regular. He was not like the present family of Joscelyns. He had taken after his mother, who was the grandmother of Ralph Joscelyn of the White House. The family had been one of greater pretensions and more gentility in his day. The heir at that time was educated in Oxford, and the Joscelyns still belonged, though gradually falling away from it, to the higher level, and counted themselves county people. Henry had been sent off early to business; but he had never lost the sentiment which so often remains to an “old family” when more substantial possessions are gone. In the case of the present representative of the name this sentiment was mere pride with a bitter edge to it, and resentful sense of downfall; but with Mr. Henry Joscelyn it was a real consciousness of superiority to the common persons round him. _Noblesse oblige_: perhaps he did not understand these words in their highest sense. The _noblesse_ was small. And the behaviour it exacted was not of a princely or magnanimous character; but still there were many things which, being a Joscelyn, he felt it incumbent upon him both to do and not to do. He would not allow himself to drop. He looked with indignation and contempt at the rudeness and roughness of his nephew’s house. Even what was best in it was, he felt, beneath him. He had never married at all, not feeling able to aspire to the only kind of wife he ever could have been content with; but to marry a parson’s daughter was an expedient Henry Joscelyn would have scorned. It would have better befitted the reigning head of so good and old a race to have followed the example of King Cophetua--a beautiful beggar-maid is a possibility always, but an insipid parson’s daughter! Mr. Henry Joscelyn had not cut his nephew--that would have been impossible too; but he looked upon him with a fierce contempt; and though he allowed Mrs. Joscelyn to be “a worthy person,” and probably quite good enough, nay, even too good, for Ralph Joscelyn as he was, still Mr. Henry could not meet her on grounds of equality--notwithstanding the fact that there was a baronet in her family, which at first had staggered him. It did not seem to him that these high claims of his were at all injured by the fact that he himself had been engaged in, and had made all his money by, trade. “I was a younger son,” he would say, with a gentle shrug of his shoulders, and his godson Harry was also a younger son. Mr. Henry believed that there was a certain amount of self-sacrifice necessary in a family. If it was a right and good thing to keep it up, then it was quite right that the younger children should have their part in sustaining its honour. Its importance, its prestige, belonged to them as well as to the heir, and it was their interest as well as their duty to make an exertion and keep it up.