But you're a bachelor, you see, Mr.Fenton, and can't be expected to know what shoes and stockings are.

Now there happens to be a friend of mine--a steady, respectable, middle-aged man--who worships the ground my girl walks on, and could make her mistress of as good a house as any within twenty miles of this, and give a home to her father in his old age, into the bargain; for I'm only a servant here, and it can't be expected that I am to go on toiling and slaving about this place for ever.

I don't say but what I've saved a few pounds, but I haven't saved enough to keep me out of the workhouse." This seemed to Gilbert rather a selfish manner of looking at a daughter's matrimonial prospects, and he ventured to hint as much in a polite way.
But the bailiff was immovable.
"What a young woman wants is a good home," he said decisively; "whether she has the sense to know it herself, or whether she hasn't, that's what she's got to look for in life." Gilbert had not spent many evenings at the Grange before he had the honour of being introduced to the estimable middle-aged suitor, whose claims Mr.Carley was always setting forth to his daughter.

He saw Stephen Whitelaw, and that individual's colourless expressionless countenance, redeemed from total blankness only by the cunning visible in the small grey eyes, impressed him with instant distrust and dislike.
"God forbid that frank warm-hearted girl should ever be sacrificed to such a fellow as this," he said to himself, as he sat on the opposite side of the hearth, smoking his cigar, and meditatively contemplating Mr.
Whitelaw conversing in his slow solemn fashion with the man who was so eager to be his father-in-law.
In the course of that first evening of their acquaintance, Gilbert was surprised to see how often Stephen Whitelaw looked at him, with a strangely-attentive expression, that had something furtive in it, some hidden meaning, as it seemed to him.

Whenever Gilbert spoke, the farmer looked up at him, always with the same sharp inquisitive glance, the same cunning twinkle in his small eyes.