And, alas! alas! the best is not very good. He is thirty now, and--the Gerards are a long-lived, tough race--he may live till ninety. He asks himself, now and then, in a sort of startled terror, is he to see opposite him at breakfast, every day for the next sixty years, this carven face, changeless as the stone saints on the walls of Felton Church? Of all the one-half of creation, is this unsuggestive, unresponsive, negative woman to be his sole portion? "It is her misfortune that she is not a woman of science," as Mr. Shandy mildly remarked of his wife, "but she _might_ ask a question." Strive as he may against the conviction, the yoke that he has taken upon himself in careless apathy has already begun to gall his withers. And yet it was not (as you may imagine) _pique_ that first made Gerard Miss Blessington's lover. It was partly that numb indifference as to anything that might happen to him, that always follows a great blow, partly sheer weariness of his father's importunities upon the subject of his marriage. He is the last scion of a family that has come down in direct male line from a Norman robber: if it be tersely predicated of him on his tombstone that he died S. P., the Hall, and the lake, and the wide fat lands will go to some distant needy cousins, with whom Sir Thomas is at dagger's drawing, and for whom he cherishes a hatred livelier even than that which poachers, Irish beggars, and vulpecides inspire in his gentle breast. The fact of his responsibilities has been chimed into St. John's ears till he is rather weary of it: he has been hearing it for the last five-and-twenty years--ever since indeed, that solemn day when, petticoats being cast aside, he was invested with the virile dignity of round jacket and breeches. "Why don't we cut off the entail?" he asks impatiently, one day, shortly after Esther's visit--a visit which has naturally given him a greater distaste for the subject than he had ever before experienced. "You and I together can do it, cannot we, Sir Thomas, and leave the property to the Foundling, or Hanwell, or to some hospital or penitentiary, where it would do a deal more good, I don't doubt, than it ever has in our hands?" But he does not mean it; his pride in the old house and the old name is as great, though not as offensively shown, as his father's. "It's all your cursed selfishness," says his parent, strutting and fuming about, one morning, over the crimson and ash-coloured squares of the library carpet; puffing out his feathers, as it were, and beginning to gobble-obble. "You prefer your lazy, lounging club life, your French chef, and d----d sybarite habits, to everything else under heaven; you don't reflect that, when a man has been given such advantages as yours, he owes corresponding duties to his country and his estate, and--and--and his _father_----" concludes Sir Thomas, rather at a loss for a peroration.