I acknowledge that much travel and experience have made me sometimes play the busybody, because I find I can do things better than other people, and I love to see folk stare--it's a way I have got.

But, after all, I am _un bon diable_, as the Frenchman says; and here I have come four or five hundred miles to lie quiet among you all, and put all your little matters to rights, just when you think they are most desperate." "I thank you for your good intentions," said Mowbray; "but I must needs say, that they would have been more effectual had you been less cunning in my behalf, and frankly told me what you knew of Lord Etherington; as it is, the matter has gone fearfully far.

I have promised him my sister--I have laid myself under personal obligations to him--and there are other reasons why I fear I must keep my word to this man, earl or no earl." "What!" exclaimed Touchwood, "would you give up your sister to a worthless rascal, who is capable of robbing the post-office, and of murdering his brother, because you have lost a trifle of money to him?
Are you to let him go off triumphantly, because he is a gamester as well as a cheat ?--You are a pretty fellow, Mr.Mowbray of St.Ronan's--you are one of the happy sheep that go out for wool, and come home shorn.
Egad, you think yourself a millstone, and turn out a sack of grain--You flew abroad a hawk, and have come home a pigeon--You snarled at the Philistines, and they have drawn your eye-teeth with a vengeance!" "This is all very witty, Mr.Touchwood," replied Mowbray; "but wit will not pay this man Etherington, or whatever he is, so many hundreds as I have lost to him." "Why, then, wealth must do what wit cannot," said old Touchwood; "I must advance for you, that is all.

Look ye, sir, I do not go afoot for nothing--if I have laboured, I have reaped--and, like the fellow in the old play, 'I have enough, and can maintain my humour'-- it is not a few hundreds, or thousands either, can stand betwixt old P.S.Touchwood and his purpose; and my present purpose is to make you, Mr.Mowbray of St.
Ronan's, a free man of the forest .-- You still look grave on it, young man ?--Why, I trust you are not such an ass as to think your dignity offended, because the plebeian Scrogie comes to the assistance of the terribly great and old house of Mowbray ?" "I am indeed not such a fool," answered Mowbray, with his eyes still bent on the ground, "to reject assistance that comes to me like a rope to a drowning man--but there is a circumstance"-- --he stopped short and drank a glass of wine--"a circumstance to which it is most painful to me to allude--but you seem my friend--and I cannot intimate to you more strongly my belief in your professions of regard than by saying, that the language held by Lady Penelope Penfeather on my sister's account, renders it highly proper that she were settled in life; and I cannot but fear, that the breaking off the affair with this man might be of great prejudice to her at this moment.

They will have Nettlewood, and they may live separate--he has offered to make settlements to that effect, even on the very day of marriage.