When there were debts,--debts for the second time, debts for the third time, the lawyers were instructed to do what in their own eyes seemed good to them.

They might pay as long as they deemed it right to pay, but they might not name Lord Neville to his father.
While things were thus the Earl married again,--the penniless daughter of a noble house,--a woman not young, for she was forty when he married her, but more than twenty years his junior.

It sufficed for him that she was noble, and as he believed good.

Good to him she was,--with a duty that was almost excessive.

Religious she was, and self-denying; giving much and demanding little; keeping herself in the background, but possessing wonderful energy in the service of others.