“Oh, you will stand up for him, of course!” cried Patty; “but I’d like you to know, if you’re making up the match on that score, that it’ll never come to pass. Me and Gervase is both against him, and father-in-law won’t go against us both, not when he gets used to me. I’d rather see it all go to an ’ospital than to that man. I can’t bear that man, looking down upon those that are better than himself, as if he was on stilts!” Patty grew red and hot in her indignation. Then she shook out her dress airily, as if shaking away the subject and the objectionable person. “Oh yes,” she said, “natural heirs!” with a conscious giggle. “It’s you that has gone and put that in father-in-law’s old head. But I told him it was early days. Dear old man. It’s a pity he is silly. I don’t think he ever can have been much in his head, any more than----. Do you?” “My uncle is in very bad health. He is ill, and his nerves are much affected. But he has always been a man quite--quite able to manage his own affairs. A man,” cried Margaret, faltering a little with indignation and distress, “of very good sense and energy, not at all like--not at all----” “Well, well,” said Patty, “time shows everything, you know, and he’s quite safe with me and Gervase; at all events, whatever comes after, his only son comes first, don’t he? And me and Gervase will see that the dear old man isn’t made a cat’s-paw of, but kept quite square.” It was with a sensation half of disappointment, yet more than half of satisfaction, that Patty found herself next morning alone in what she called so confidently her own house. Alone, for Sir Giles, of course, was in his own room, and was much better there, she felt, and Gervase, so long as he was kept in good humour, was not very troublesome. To be sure, it cost a good deal of exertion on her part to keep him in good humour. He felt, as so many a wooer of his simple mind has done, the want of the employment of courtship, which had so long amused and occupied him. He could no longer go to the Seven Thorns in the evening, a resource which was entirely cut off from his vacant life, from the fact of having Patty always with him, without the exercise of any endeavour on his own part. The excitement of keeping free of his mother’s scrutiny; the still greater excitement of fishing furtively for Patty’s attention, making her see that he was there, persuading her by all the simple wiles of which he was master to grant him an interview; the alarm of getting home, with all the devices which had to be practised in order to get in safely, without being called to account and made to say where he had been--and inspected, to see what he had been doing: all this took a great deal of the salt out of poor Gervase’s life. He did not know, now that he had settled down again at home, and all the annoying sensations of the crises were over, what to do with himself in the evenings. Patty and he alone were rather less lively