He found Mr. Sampson and his sister just sitting down to dinner, and was welcomed with enthusiasm by both. ‘Upon my soul, you’re a most extraordinary fellow,’ exclaimed the lawyer, after a good deal of handshaking. ‘You run off in no end of a hurry, promising to come back in a week or two at latest, and for six months we see no more of you; and you don’t even favour your family solicitor with a line to say why you don’t come. There are not many men in England who would play fast and loose with such chances as yours. Your cousin, when he made that curious will of his, told me you had been wild, but I was not prepared for such wildness as this.’ ‘Really, Tom,’ remonstrated Miss Sampson, blushing the salmon pink peculiar to sandy-haired beauty, ‘you have no right to talk to Mr. Treverton like that.’ ‘Yes, I have,’ answered Sampson, who prided himself on his open manner--his ‘bonnomy,’ as he called it; ‘I have the right given me by a genuine interest in his affairs--the interest of a friend rather than a lawyer. You don’t suppose it’s for the sake of the six-and-eightpences I take so much upon myself, Lizzie? No, it is because I have a sincere regard for my old client’s kinsman, and a disinterested anxiety for his welfare.’ ‘I think you may make your mind easy about me,’ said John, without any appearance of elation; ‘I am going to be married on the last day of this month, and I want you to prepare the settlement.’ ‘Bravo!’ cried Tom Sampson, flourishing his napkin; ‘I’m almost as glad as if I’d backed the winner of the double event and woke up to find myself worth twenty thousand pounds. My dear fellow, I congratulate you. The Hazlehurst property is a good eight thousand a year. There’s three thousand in ground rents in Beechampton, and your dividends from railways and consols bring your income to a clean fourteen thousand.’ ‘If Miss Malcolm were penniless, I should be as proud of winning her as I am now,’ said John, gravely. ‘That’s a very gentlemanlike way of looking at it,’ exclaimed the lawyer, as much as to say, ‘We know all about it; you are bound to say that kind of thing.’ Miss Sampson looked down at her plate, and felt that appetite was gone for ever. It was foolishness, no doubt, to feel so keen a pang; but girlhood is prone to foolishness, and Eliza Sampson had not yet owned to thirty. She had known from the first that John Treverton was to marry Laura Malcolm, and yet she had allowed herself to indulge in secret worship at his shrine. He was handsome and attractive, and Miss Sampson had seen so few young men who were either one or the other, that she may be forgiven for fixing her young unhackneyed affection on the first distinguished stranger who came within the narrow orbit of her colourless life.