Mary looked at him with a dulness of intelligence quite unusual to her. There are things in the most limited minds which genius itself could not divine. The honourable and generous, and the selfish and grasping, do not know what each other mean. They are as if they spoke a different language. And her brother was to Mary as if he veiled his meaning in an unknown tongue. She gazed at him with a haze of dulness in her eyes. What was it he intended to let her know? Disbelief of her, a suggestion that she lied! and something more--she could not make out what, as the rule of his own conduct! He looked at her, on the other hand, with an air of penetration, a clever consciousness of seeing through and through her and her designs, which excited Mary to exasperation. How could they ever understand each other with all this between? “I am going to see my father,” said Randolph; “that of course is the object of my visit; I suppose he will not refuse to keep me for a day or two. And in the mean time why should we quarrel? I only warn you that I come with my eyes open, and am not to be made a dupe of. Good-bye for the present--we shall meet no doubt at dinner the best of friends.” Mary stood still where he left her, and watched him as he went slowly down the slope and round the corner of the house. He was shorter than John and stouter, with that amplitude of outline which a wealthy rural living and a small parish are apt to confer. A comfortable man, fond of good living, fond of his ease; yet taking the trouble to come here, for what?--to baffle some supposed wicked contrivances and plots against himself. Mary remembered that Randolph had taken the great family misfortune as a special wrong to him. How dared the evil fates to interfere with his comfort or rumour to assail his name? He had said frankly that it could be nothing to the others in comparison. And was it once more the idea that he himself was touched, which had roused him out of his comfortable rectory to come here and assert himself? But how did the arrival of John’s children affect that? Mary, in her long calm, had not entered into those speculations about the future which most people more or less think necessary when the head of the house is old. She had not asked herself what would happen when her father died, except vaguely in respect to herself, knowing that she would then in all likelihood leave the old Castle. John was the heir. Somehow or other, she did not know how, the inheritance would be taken up for him. This had been the conclusion in her mind without reason given or required. And Randolph had not come into the sphere of her imagination at all as having anything to do with it. What should he have to do with it when there was John? And even now Mary did not know and could not understand the reason of his objection to John’s children. She stood and looked after him with a dull beating of pain in her heart. And as he turned round the corner