Some days passed. Mistress Malvine had been buried. No direct communication had taken place between Anthony and his father. The gentle Bessie, full of distress at the breach, had done what she could to heal it; but ineffectually. Each was too proud and obstinate to make the first advance. Bessie's influence with her father was of the slightest--he had never showed love towards his plain daughter; and Anthony was too much of a man, in his own idea, to allow himself to be guided by a woman. Luke was perplexed more than ever. Urith was now left wholly without proper protection. Her uncle was worse than useless--an element of disorder in the household, and of disintegration in the pecuniary affairs of the family. The estate of Willsworthy did not come to him. It had belonged to his mother, and from his mother had gone to his sister, and now passed to his niece. It was a manor that seemed doomed to follow the spindle. But, though it had not become his property, he was trustee and guardian for his niece till she married; and a more unsatisfactory trustee or improper guardian could hardly have been chosen. He was, indeed, an amiable, well-intentioned man; but was weak, and over-fond of conviviality and the society of his social inferiors, from whom alone he met with deference. He had been brought up to the profession of the law; but, on his father's death, had thrown up what little work had come to him that he might be with his mother and sister, as manager of the estate. When his sister married Richard Malvine he was again thrown on his own resources, and lived mainly on subventions from his sister and friends, and a little law business that he picked up and mismanaged, till his brother-in-law died, when he returned to Willsworthy, to the mismanagement of that property which Richard Malvine had barely recovered from the disorder and deterioration into which it had been brought by Solomon Gibbs's previous rule. The old fellow was unable to stick to any sort of work, to concentrate his thoughts for ten minutes on any object, was irresolute, and swayed by those with whom he associated. His sister lectured and scolded him, and he bore her rebuke with placid amiability, and promises of amendment; promises that were never fulfilled. One great source of annoyance to his sister was his readiness to talk over all family matters at the tavern with his drinking comrades, to explain his views as to what was to be done in every contingency, and dilate on the pecuniary difficulties of his sister, and his schemes for the remedy of the daily deepening impecuniosity. This public discussion of the affairs of the family had done much to bring it into disrepute. Those who heard Mr. Gibbs over his cups retailed what they heard to their friends and wives with developments of their own, and the whole neighbourhood had come to believe that the Malvines were a family irretrievably lost, and that Willsworthy was a poor and intractable estate. Those who used their