In one wing of Dassell Court Miss Trebasson resided with her mother, the Honourable Mrs. Trebasson, sister-in-law to his lordship; and in that part of the shire mother and daughter made genteel poverty not merely respectable, but almost fashionable. They dressed like nuns and lived like anchorites; but being ladies born, of a stately carriage and wont to dispense alms out of a most insufficient income, people of all classes bowed down before and did them homage. Even Sir Thomas and his wife and daughters they received with a distant courtesy, which taught the worthy baronet and his family they were too rich and too new to be received quite on an exact equality by their poorer neighbours. To Miss Trebasson, whom he chanced to meet at the Vicarage, Mr. Mortomley was indebted for that private view of Dassell Court, which showed him at once how little and how much the Mortomleys had formerly been; how little, that is, without the glamour and how much with it. Mrs. Trebasson, who was slightly paralysed, received him with great kindness, and, so far as her infirmity would permit, waxed eloquent on the subject of family histories in general, and the history of the Mortomley family in particular. Drinking tea out of very fine china in company with these ladies, listening to Mrs. Trebasson's slow talk and old-world ideas, his eyes wandering over woods and park, and the great silence which necessarily surrounds a secluded country mansion, causing a tension on his nerves of hearing which the rattle of East-cheap had never done,--Mortomley felt for the time a convert to the doctrine that, as compared with birth, riches were but dross; that the lives of these two must be happy and peaceful beyond that of dwellers in towns; that it would be delightful to dream existence away in just such an old mansion as this, which had once belonged to his ancestors, reading, thinking, experimenting, without a thought of profit or dread of failure to break in even for a moment upon the illusions of his life. Mortomley was an experimenter. When ruin has marked a family for her own, she usually endows the last of the race with some such form of genius, which clings about and lends a certain picturesque grace to his decay, as ivy climbing around an almost lifeless tree clothes it with a freshness and a beauty it lacked in the days of its strength. And the form of genius of the first Mortomley who engaged in trade had, with every condition of existence altered, reappeared in this later, weaker, and more sensitive descendant.