“She is Mrs. Butler; and her husband, when he was alive, was Colonel Butler, militarily known as Wat Tartar. He was a terrible pipeclay; and her son Tony is the factotum at the Abbey; or rather he was, till Mark told him to shave, a poodle, or singe a pony, or paint a wheelbarrow--I forget; but I know it was something he had done once out of good-humor, and the hussar creature fancied he'd make him do it again through an indignity.” “And he--I mean Butler--stands upon being a gentleman?” “I should think he does; is not his birth good?” “Certainly; the Butlers are of an old stock.” “They talk of an uncle, Sir Ramrod,--it is n't Ramrod, but it's like it,--a tiresome old fellow, who was envoy at Naples, and who married, I believe, a ballet-dancer, and who might leave Tony all his fortune, if he liked,--which he doesn't.” “Having no family of his own?” asked Maitland, as he puffed his cigar. “None; but that doesn't matter, for he has turned Jesuit, and will leave everything to the sacred something or other in Rome. I 've heard all that from old Widow Butler, who has a perfect passion for talking of her amiable brother-in-law, as she calls him. She hates him,--always did hate him,--and taught Tony to hate him; and with all that it was only yesterday she said to me that perhaps she was not fully justified in sending back unopened two letters he had written to her,--one after the loss of some Canadian bonds of hers, which got rumored abroad in the newspapers; the other was on Tony's coming of age; and she said, 'Becky, I begin to suspect that I had no right to carry my own unforgiveness to the extent of an injury to my boy,--tell me what you would do.'” “And what was your answer?” “I'd have made it up with the old swell. I'd say, 'Is not this boy more to you than all those long-petticoated tonsured humbugs, who can always cheat some one or other out of an Inheritance?' I 'd say, 'Look at him, and you'll fancy it's Walter telling you that he forgives you.'” “If he be like most of his order, Miss Becky, he 'd only smile at your appeal,” said Maitland, coldly. “Well, I 'd not let it be laughing matter with him, I can tell you; stupid wills are broken every day of the week, and I don't think the Jesuits are in such favor in England that a jury would decide for them against an English youth of the kith and kin of the testator.” “You speak cleverly, Miss Graham, and you show that you know all the value that attaches to popular sympathy in the age we live in.” “And don't you agree with me?” “Ah, there's a deal to be said on either side.” “Then, for Heaven's sake, don't say it. There--no--more to the left--there, where you see the blue smoke rising over the rocks--there stands the widow's cottage. I don't know how she endures the loneliness of it. Could _you_ face such a life?”