When young Frank Randall, the lawyer's son, took to calling at the old house very often upon summer evenings, and by various signs and tokens showed himself smitten with Ellen Carley, the bailiff treated the young man so rudely that he was fain to cease from coming altogether, and to content himself with an occasional chance meeting in the lane, when Ellen had business at Crosber, and walked there alone after tea.

He would not have been a particularly good match for any one, being only an articled clerk to his father, whose business in the little market-town of Malsham was by no means extensive; and William Carley spoke of him scornfully as a pauper.
He was a tall good-looking young fellow, however, with a candid pleasant face and an agreeable manner; so Ellen was not a little angry with her father for his rudeness, still more angry with him for his encouragement of her other admirer, a man called Stephen Whitelaw, who lived about a mile from the Grange, and farmed his own land, an estate of some extent for that part of the country.
"If you must marry," said the bailiff, "and it's what girls like you seem to be always thinking about, you can't do better than take up with Steph Whitelaw.

He's a warm man, Nell, and a wife of his will never want a meal of victuals or a good gown to her back.

You'd better not waste your smiles and your civil words on a beggar like young Randall, who won't have a home to take you to for these ten years to come--not then, perhaps--for there's not much to be made by law in Malsham now-a-days.
And when his father dies--supposing he's accommodating enough to die in a reasonable time, which it's ten to one he won't be--the young man will have his mother and sisters to keep upon the business very likely, and there'd be a nice look-out for you.

Now, if you marry my old friend Steph, he can make you a lady." This was a very long speech for Mr.Carley.It was grumbled out in short spasmodic sentences between the slow whiffs of his pipe, as he sat by the fire in a little parlour off the hall, with his indefatigable daughter at work at a table near him.
"Stephen Whitelaw had need be a gentleman himself before he could make me a lady," Nelly answered, laughing.