SINK OR SWIM? SINK OR SWIM? A Novel. BY THE AUTHOR OF “RECOMMENDED TO MERCY,” ETC. IN THREE VOLUMES. VOL. I. LONDON: TINSLEY BROTHERS, 18 CATHERINE ST. STRAND. 1868. [_The right of translation and reproduction is reserved._] LONDON: ROBSON AND SON, GREAT NORTHERN PRINTING WORKS, PANCRAS ROAD, N.W. SINK OR SWIM? CHAPTER I. WHAT THEY SAID IN THE VILLAGE. “If I hadn’t heard it from Mrs. Clay herself, I never would have believed it! To think that John Beacham, who’s a sensible man as men go, should be marrying an Irishwoman! If Honor Blake was English-born now, one wouldn’t blame him so much; but to choose a girl that comes of people who, as everyone knows, you can’t trust farther than you can see them, is what I call a sin and a shame.” The speaker was a woman of low stature, elderly, and sharp of voice and feature. She was seated at a round old-fashioned mahogany table, on which a teapot of the material known as Britannia metal steamed with a pleasant warmth, while the odour of buttered toast, “hot and hot,” filled the little room in which she and a chosen chum and gossip had met together to talk over the domestic affairs of their friends and neighbours. The name and title of the first-mentioned lady was Mrs. Thwaytes, and she, being at the present time a widow, and highly respected, kept a small general shop in an old-fashioned village, to which I shall give the name of Switcham. This village, situated near the grandest and most imposing of England’s rivers, could be reached by express train in something a little under an hour and a half from London. It was, considering this proximity, rather a behindhand village. Progress had not hitherto made any gigantic strides in the old-world-looking place, where not a single house was less than a century old, and where the aged inhabitants of the quiet spot had not as yet ceased to speak of crinoline as an abomination, and the absence (on young women’s heads) of that decent article called a cap as a sign and symbol of a lost and abandoned soul.