~287~~"It was ever thus, D'Almaine," said Lady Mary; "always hesitating between a natural liberality of disposition, and a cold, calculating, acquired parsimony, that has never increased our fortune in the sum of sixpence, or added in the slightest degree to our domestic comforts." "All the _prejudice of education_" said D'Almaine, good-humouredly; "my old uncle, the banker, to whose bounty we are both much indebted, my dear, early inculcated these notions of thrift into the brain of a certain lighthearted young gentleman, whose buoyant spirits sometimes led him a little beyond the _barrier of prudence_, and too often left him environed with difficulties in the _marshes of impediment_. 'Look before you leap,' was a wise saw of the old gentleman's; and 'be just before you're generous,' a proverb that never failed to accompany a temporary supply, or an additional demand upon his generosity."--"Hang your old uncle!" replied Lady Mary, pouting and trying to look ill-tempered in the face of Lord Henry's good-natured remonstrance,--"I never ask a favour for myself, or solicit you to take the recreation necessary to your own health and that of your family, but I am pestered with the revised musty maxims of your dead old uncle. He has been consigned to the earth these ten years, and ~288~~if it were not for the ten thousand per annum he left us, ought long since to have shared the fate of his ancestry, whose names were never heard more of than the tributary tablet imparts to the eye of curiosity in a country church, and within whose limits all inquiry ends." "Gratitude, Lady Mary, if not respect for my feelings, should preserve that good man's name from reproach." Lord Henry's eye was unusually expressive--he continued:--"The coronet that graces your own soul-inspiring face would lack the lustre of its present brilliancy, but for the generous bequest of the old city banker, whose _plum_ was the _sweetest windfall_ that ever dropt into the empty purse of the poor possessor of an ancient baronial title. The old battlements of Crackenbury have stood many a siege, 'tis true; but that formidable engine of modern warfare, the _catapulta_ of the auctioneer, had, but for him, proved more destructive to its walls than the battering-ram and hoarse cannonades of ancient rebels."