Although surrounded by every luxury which can minister to his personal comfort, he is not at all extravagant, and, indeed, saves more than half his annual income. This he does, not from positive avarice, but because he feels ever more and more strongly that money is power. Moreover, it will be well to have a handsome sum in hand whenever he marries: for he is still firmly minded to find a wife who will devote herself to taking care of him. Quite recently a paragraph has appeared in the Oldchester newspaper announcing the probability of a marriage between "our distinguished townsman, Mr. Theodore Bransby, whose career at the Bar is being watched with pride and pleasure in his native city, and the Lady Euphemia Haggistown, daughter of the Earl of Cauldkail, etc., etc., etc." Lady Euphemia is a faded, timid, gentlewoman of some five or six-and-thirty years of age, with neither money nor beauty. She is sometimes haunted by the ghost of a romantic attachment to a penniless young navy officer lost at sea hard upon twenty years ago. But she has a soft, submissive desire to win the kindly regard of the remarkably stiff and cold young gentleman whom her father has decided she is to marry whenever he shall see fit to ask her. But poor Lady Effie does not succeed in softening the implacable correctness of her suitor's demeanour into anything very humanly sympathetic. Theodore is quite certain to make the most of his wife's title and social standing in dealing with the world in general, but it is to be feared that he may think fit to balance matters by tyrannizing over her in private with some rigour. Mrs. Dormer-Smith often moralizes her family history, entangling herself in many metaphysical knots in the course of her cogitations as to what would have happened if something else had happened which never did happen! Of course, if poor dear Augustus had not thrown himself away on Susan Dobbs things would have been very different. But even in spite of that, much might have been retrieved had he not made a second and still more shocking _mésalliance_ with a strolling Italian singer; because, probably, if Augustus had come home after the death of his cousin Lucius in a proper spirit, and under not discreditable circumstances, and had conducted himself so as to conciliate his uncle, the old man would never have thought of marrying again. Constance Hadlow would never have become Viscountess Castlecombe, and no heir would have appeared to thrust Augustus from his inheritance.