The very indifferent success of Lord Anophel did not escape the eye of his abject slave, the Reverend Mr. Grovelgrub, whose vanity led him to misinterpret Anthelia’s general sweetness of manner into the manifestation of something like a predilection for himself. Having made this notable discovery, he sat down to calculate the probability of his chance of Miss Melincourt’s fortune on the one hand, and the certainty of church-preferment, through the patronage of the Marquis of Agaric, on the other. The sagacious reflection, that a bird in the hand was worth two in the bush, determined him not to risk the loss of the Marquis’s favour for the open pursuit of a doubtful success; but he resolved to carry on a secret attack on the affections of Anthelia, and not to throw off the mask to Lord Anophel till he could make sure of his prize. It would have totally disconcerted the schemes of the Honourable Mrs. Pinmoney, if Lord Anophel had made any progress in the favour of Anthelia—not only because she had made up her mind that her young friend should be her niece and Lady Paxarett, but because, from the moment of Lord Anophel’s appearance, she determined on drawing lines of circumvallation round him, to compel him to surrender at discretion to her dear Danaretta, who was very willing to second her views. That Lord Anophel was both a fool and a coxcomb, did not strike her at all as an objection; on the contrary, she considered them as very favourable circumstances for the facilitation of her design. As Anthelia usually passed the morning in the seclusion of her library Lord Anophel and the Reverend Mr. Grovelgrub killed the time in shooting; Sir Telegraph, in driving Mrs. and Miss Pinmoney in his barouche, to astonish the natives of the mountain-villages; Harum O’Scarum, Esquire, in riding full gallop along the best roads, looking every now and then at his watch, to see how time went; Mr. Derrydown, in composing his troubadour ballad; Mr. Feathernest, in writing odes to all the crowned heads in Europe; and Mr. Hippy, in getting very ill after breakfast every day of a new disease, which came to its climax at the intermediate point of time between breakfast and dinner, showed symptoms of great amendment at the ringing of the first dinner-bell, was very much alleviated at the butler’s summons, vanished entirely at the sight of Anthelia, and was consigned to utter oblivion after the ladies retired from table, when the Reverend Mr. Grovelgrub lent his clerical assistance to lay its ghost in the Red Sea of a copious libation of claret. Music and conversation consumed the evenings. Mr. Feathernest and Mr. Derrydown were both zealous admirers of old English literature; but the former was chiefly enraptured with the ecclesiastical writers and the translation of the Bible; the latter admired nothing but ballads, which he maintained to be, whether ancient or modern, the only manifestations of feeling and thought containing any vestige of truth and nature.