From his mother he had inherited a pride of family which would have been at once ludicrous and intolerable, but that such pride, unlike that of wealth, rarely finds voice sufficient to proclaim itself. Herself, the daughter of one parvenu, and the widow of another, it was perhaps natural that after Mrs. Halling married Mortomley the elder, she should, when reckoning up his claims to social and personal consideration, have placed rather an undue value on the monuments, tablets, brasses, lists of doles, and other such like matters, which were still to be seen in Great Dassell Church, where the Mortomleys had once their great family pew, that now, with the lands and woods and manors, was merged in larger properties owned by mightier men than they had ever been. And the reader may be quite sure that she instructed her son in all these matters. Not merely had he grown up to think his father the cleverest man in the world, his mother the wisest woman, his step-brother a model of what a brother and a son should be, but the Mortomley family as one of the first consideration; and, therefore, it is not, perhaps, a matter for astonishment, that when ill and out of spirits, he should try to recruit his health and improve his mental tone by visiting a place where those of his ancestors, who would have turned up their patrician noses at colour works and colour-makers, had, from cradle to grave, travelled that pleasant road which leads to ruin. To Great Dassell he accordingly made his way, companionless; for one of the many evils of a youth having been brought up under the eye of a woman is, that when manhood surprises him with its presence, he finds the capacity for making male friends has somehow been lost in the process of his one-sided education. He rented farmhouse apartments, from the windows of which he could see the turrets and chimneys of the old mansion, now owned by Lord Darsham, and called Dassell Court, that had been formerly known as Mortomley Place, or most commonly, "The Place;" and before a week was over, it was rumoured through all the country round and about Great Dassell, that a great-great-grandson of the last Mortomley, of The Place, was lodging at Braffin's Farm, and hand-and-glove with the vicar, a nephew of the late Lord Darsham. More than that, Sir Thomas Laman left his card at Braffin's, and supplemented that delicate attention by asking Mr. Mortomley to dinner; and it was well known Sir Thomas was twice as rich as Lord Darsham, for he could afford to reside on his property, whilst his lordship was obliged to shut up the Court and live upon as little as might be in "foreign parts."