Besides the advantages obtained from his father’s partiality, Roderick Lowther had been the favourite of a maiden aunt of miserly habits and independent fortune, who had condescended to give him her name at the baptismal font, and who had never bestowed on him anything else--except, indeed, a neat cloth-bound copy of “The Dairyman’s Daughter,” presented to the lad one birthday, and promptly disposed of at a rag-and-bone shop in the High Street of Harrow for the small sum of fourpence. But although Miss Dorothea Burnett had not been very liberal in her donations to her favourite nephew during her lifetime, it was supposed that, after her departure from this world, the young man would reap the reward of occasional dutifully-worded letters and affected deference to her wishes, and that the reward would be a very substantial one; for Miss Burnett had contrived to swell her own little fortune by many stray windfalls in the way of legacies from relatives, whose regard her busy married sister Mrs. Lowther had neglected to cultivate. Beyond this, the maiden lady had bought small but profitable tenements, and had dabbled a little in shares; and she had watched her small investments with an intelligence, and nursed them with a tenderness, which her stockbroker had admiringly declared to be a credit to the sex she adorned by her commercial acumen. So Roderick Lowther, finding his younger brother on the field, was alarmed by the idea that he might have been undermined in this direction, and was by no means inclined to lose any time before presenting himself to his spinster aunt. He brushed and curled his amber whiskers with more than usual circumspection, therefore, on the morning after the dinner at Mrs. Tredethlyn’s; and walking through Covent Garden, on his way to Miss Burnett’s Bloomsbury hermitage, he expended sixpence on a hothouse flower to put in the button-hole of the dark-blue coat which he wore under a flimsy outer garment of pale grey. He had dressed himself very carefully, for he knew that, in spite of the maiden lady’s lectures on the subject of prudence, her feminine eye was fascinated by the elegant frivolities which she affected to disapprove.