But Lionel must want money very grievously indeed, before he would have consented to take honest Jan's.
"I have five hundred of my own, you know, Jan," he said.

"More than I can use yet awhile." So he fixed upon the Bar, and would have hastened to London but for Lady Verner's illness.

In the weak, low state to which disappointment and irritability had reduced her, she could not bear to lose sight of Lionel, or permit him to depart.

"It will be time enough when I am dead; and that won't be long first," was the constant burden of her song to him.
He believed his mother to be little more likely to die than he was, but he was too dutiful a son to cross her in her present state.

He gathered certain ponderous tomes about him, and began studying law on his own account, shutting himself up in his room all day to do it.