Early in life he had been taught that he ought to marry an heiress for the benefit of his estate--his ancestral estate; the restoration of which he had been bred to consider the grand object and ambition of life.

His views had been strangely baffled; but the more they were thwarted the more pertinaciously he clung to them.

Naturally kind, generous, and social, he had sunk, at length, into the anchorite and the miser.

All other speculations that should retrieve his ancestral honours had failed: but there is one speculation that never fails--the speculation of _saving!_ It was to this that he now indissolubly attached himself.

At moments he was open to all his old habits; but such moments were rare and few.