In the first impulse of anger at the flight of his daughters and the degradation of his family, (for Bacon was the son of a tradesman, and Palmer was nobody knew who) Mr. Trewbody had made his will, and left the whole sum which he had designed for his three daughters, to the eldest. Whether the situation of Margaret and the two orphans might have touched him is perhaps doubtful,—for the family were either light-hearted, or hard-hearted, and his heart was of the hard sort; but he died suddenly a few months before his sons-in-law. The only son, Trewman Trewbody, Esq. a Wiltshire fox-hunter like his father, succeeded to the estate; and as he and his eldest sister hated each other cordially, Miss Melicent left the manor-house and established herself in the Close at Salisbury, where she lived in that style which a portion of £6000. enabled her in those days to support. The circumstance which might appear so greatly to have aggravated Mrs. Palmer's distress, if such distress be capable of aggravation, prevented her perhaps from eventually sinking under it. If the birth of her child was no alleviation of her sorrow, it brought with it new feelings, new duties, new cause for exertion, and new strength for it. She wrote to Melicent and to her brother, simply stating her own destitute situation, and that of the orphan Leonard; she believed that their pride would not suffer them either to let her starve or go to the parish for support, and in this she was not disappointed. An answer was returned by Miss Trewbody informing her that she had nobody to thank but herself for her misfortunes; but that notwithstanding the disgrace which she had brought upon the family, she might expect an annual allowance of ten pounds from the writer, and a like sum from her brother; upon this she must retire into some obscure part of the country, and pray God to forgive her for the offence she had committed in marrying beneath her birth and against her father's consent.