“What a little Jesuit it is!” said Mrs. Sewell, patting her cheek. “Come, child, I 'll be equal with you. I 'll enter the room on your arm, and say, 'Sir William, your granddaughter insisted on my remaining; I thought it an awkwardness, but she tells me she is the mistress here, and I obey.'” “And you will find he will be too well-bred to contradict you,” said Lucy, while a deep blush covered her face and throat. “Oh, I think him positively charming!” said Mrs. Sewell, as she arranged her hair before the glass; “I think him charming. My mother-in-law and I have a dozen pitched battles every day on the score of his temper and his character. _My_ theory is, the only intolerable thing on earth is a fool; and whether it be that Lady Lendrick suspects me of any secret intention to designate one still nearer to her by this reservation, I do not know, but the declaration drives her half crazy. Come, Lucy, we shall be keeping grandpapa waiting for us.” They moved down the stairs arm-in-arm, without a word; but as they gained the door of the dining-room, Mrs. Sewell turned fully round and said, in a low deep voice, “Marry anything,--rake, gambler, villain,--anything, the basest and the blackest; but never take a fool, for a fool means them all combined.” CHAPTER XXVIII. THE NEST WITH STRANGE “BIRDS” IN IT To the Swan's Nest, very differently tenanted from what we saw it at the opening of our story, we have now to conduct our reader. Its present occupant--“the acquisition to any neighborhood,” as the house-agent styled him--was Colonel Sewell. Lady Lendrick had taken the place for her son on finding that Sir William would not extend his hospitality to him. She had taken the precaution not merely to pay a year's rent in advance, but to make a number of changes in the house and its dependencies, which she hoped might render the residence more palatable to him, and reconcile him in some degree to its isolation and retirement. The Colonel was, however, one of those men--they are numerous enough in this world--who canvass the mouth of the gift-horse, and have few scruples in detecting the signs of his age. He criticised the whole place with a most commendable frankness. It was a “pokey little hole.” It was dark; it was low-ceilinged. It was full of inconveniences. The furniture was old-fashioned. You had to mount two steps into the drawing-room and go down three into the dining-room. He had to cross a corridor to his bath-room, and there was a great Tudor window in the small breakfast-parlor, that made one feel as if sitting in a lantern. As for the stables, “he would n't put a donkey into them.” No light, no ventilation,--no anything, in short. To live surrounded with so many inconveniences was the most complete assertion of his fallen condition, and, as he said, “he had never realized his fall in the world till he settled down in that miserable Nest.”