Old Josh Randolph, as he was familiarly called, had been for very many years the trusted solicitor and man of business of the Vavasour family. A better-hearted and a more truly honest man--as all who knew him allowed--never existed than Joshua Randolph, as one proof of which it may be recorded in his favour that he had made no large fortune out of the quarrels and cantankerousness of his clients. Neither--to his credit be it recorded--had he ever taken undue advantage of their necessities. Young Vavasour, who had known “Josh” from the time when the heir-apparent was a lad at Eton, had had recourse to the old man’s advice in many a boyish scrape, and later, when the handsome youth had grown to be a man, and his “entanglements” were of a more complicated and less venial character, old Josh was still the attorney to whose counsels he turned, and who had never (all praise to him) been detected in that unfeeling act of pilfering, namely, that of _making_ occasions for the swelling of his lawyer’s bill. This rarely excellent individual had heard with regret and shame that work for the long-robed gentlemen was likely, through Lady Millicent’s bitter discontent, to be ere long cut out. He made no secret of his opinion on the subject, and Lady Millicent, finding that the family lawyer was not the “man for her money,” soon removed the light of her countenance from the steady, old-fashioned firm of which Mr. Randolph was the senior partner. Her ladyship’s first visit in the Lincoln’s-inn chambers (where old Josh received her with a slow and respectful courtesy, but without a grain of subservience either in his speech or manner) was also the last. Far too _slow_, perhaps indeed too rigidly honest, for the requirements of the _maîtresse femme_ was the steady-going anti-progress solicitor. There was something in the very air of that business-room of his, an air redolent of musty respectability, that was utterly out of harmony and keeping with Lady Millicent’s grand manner, her rapid energetic movements, and the authoritative mode of speech which she habitually adopted. The experiment had been duly tried of taking the old man by surprise and startling him into acquiescence; but never--it did not greatly grieve the faithful Josh that so it was--did the great lady of Gillingham give a second thought to the inhabitant of that dingy room piled high with japanned deed-boxes and with ancient faded folios. The lawyer’s absence of sympathy in her ladyship’s cause was evidenced in every response he made to her questions and suggestions. A cautious man he was and a composed--one not to be lightly moved from his opinions, and who deemed the will of the late Earl of Gillingham a document almost sacred in its character. When Lady Millicent astonished the clerks at Messrs. Randolph and Bretts’ by the apparition of her stately person, she was far indeed from imagining that anything short of the most obsequious compliance