Letty knew a great deal more of Thorsby’s life than had yet reached Woodburn, but she had buried it and the sorrow of it in her heart, and would not breathe a syllable of it except to God, which she did with most fervent prayers and scalding tears. Many a report had come to her from a most faithful quarter, and that was Thomas Barnsdale, the manager of Thorsby’s business, a man who regarded the concern and the reputation of his employer as his own. He was a Methodist in religion, and a great reader of books of general literature of a solid kind. He had grown up from a boy in the concern, and was ever at his post, and ever regardless of his own labour to conduct it to advantage. The unsteady life of Thorsby was all brought to his knowledge, and he had not hesitated to speak seriously to him and repeatedly, even at the risk of dismissal. He asked him earnestly to recollect the shortened life and injured name and fortunes of his father; and to act as he ought to do with such favour as God had showered on him in such a wife, and in such friends all round. Thorsby had taken these sermons, as he called them, not amiss, but he had not altered. Every day Mr. Barnsdale heard of some wild exploit of Thorsby and his comrades—practical jokes of the most daring and expensive kind. One of these they had carried on at the expense of a young surgeon of the town, whose vanity they had excited by a letter written to him as from a lady of fortune at Bristol, who had seen him at Castleborough, and fallen deeply in love with him. A long correspondence had been kept up between the young man and the imagined lady, the letters purporting to be from her having been duly posted, and the young surgeon’s received by an accomplice at Bristol. At length the _dénouément_ was to take place. The lady was to meet him at Cheltenham; relays of horses were engaged for him at the lady’s cost all the way from Castleborough to Cheltenham, where he was to proceed in a private carriage, and there the marriage was to take place by special licence. All was found by the young man arranged as stated, and away he posted free-cost to Cheltenham, only to find at the appointed rendezvous a letter from the improvised lady, saying she had changed her mind. This could not have been carried out except at an expense which none but very foolish and very mischievous fellows would have incurred, but the delight which it occasioned them, and the hints which they from time to time gave to the hoaxed inamorato, that they knew of the affair, seemed ample satisfaction to their perverted minds.