Margaret shakes off three suitors, unworthy souls who merit rejection, though she is so lacking in self-confidence that she gives serious consideration to two of them. Mr. Maguire--the clergyman with the wandering squinting eye--catches her by surprise with his proposal, and she asks for two weeks to think it over. A big mistake--it raises false hopes in Mr. Maguire. She is called away because of her brother's illness before giving the ambitious curate an answer, and she enters the orbit of her cousin John Ball, a widower who had bored her by talking about nothing but money. The author never refers to John Ball as the hero of the story, and indeed he is not unblemished. But he turns out to be Miss Mackenzie's hero, barely making the cut. He has a house full of children of his own, and though a barrister by profession, he hardly practices law. He is the Victorian equivalent of a day trader, going to town every day to follow the market prices and manage his investments, which seem to yield him barely enough to feed his family. He discusses his investments with his mother every night. When he proposes to Margaret, neither she nor the reader is sure whether it is for love or for money, but whatever, she accepts. And then Trollope pulls a rabbit out of the hat. In doing research on disposition of the will that had seemed to leave Margaret her fortune, the lawyer determines that the bequest had already been deeded to the Ball family and was therefore not available to be left to Margaret. So now John Ball has it all and Margaret has nothing. And when Mr. Maguire appears and claims that Margaret is his fiancée, John fails the test. He says nothing when it is time for him to reassure Margaret that he believes her, and she immediately returns to the miserable lodgings on the Thames in London. And during the long deliberations about confirming whose money it really is, he says nothing to her. She considers herself bound to him even though he may no longer want her, having the money and not having to bother about the girl. She is still pretty low on the self-esteem scale.