How the bachelors' party proceeded in that locality, and how the
failings of the parlour chimney were corrected at the cottage,
imaginative readers may suppose; but on the third day after Harry's
departure there arrived a note, stating that his host had invited him to
remain a fortnight that they were to have shooting in the fine frosty
weather he thought he might stay. Mrs. Phipps Bunting sent her
approbation by return of post. There was a colony of rats to be
expatriated, a clearing out of the coal cellar to be achieved, and a
bottling of cider to get forward, under which considerations she
concluded he was better out of the way; but all these things were
accomplished, and more than the specified time elapsed, when another
note came to say that Lacy positively would not let Harry home without
seeing his uncle, the great barrister, who lived in the nearest assize
town; and the legal protector of Miss Jenny 'thought he might go on that
visit.'

There was a graver and more lengthy reply to that communication; but the
fates forbade that Harry should read Mrs Bunting's in time. Charles
Lacy's housekeeper had a standing-order to put all letters into a huge
card-bracket, which that young gentleman affirmed had been presented to
him by an heiress of L.20,000 in her own right; and Mrs Bunting's
epistle was placed in the receptacle--for before its arrival Harry had,
like an undutiful husband, started with Charles for the house of his
uncle. The old barrister, though not one of the brightest, was among the
successful of his profession, and kept a hospitable, easy-going house,
with a maiden sister and two dashing nephews, in a comfortable English
country town, at one end of which was a railway station for the coming
and going of London trains. Our Harry had been always an agreeable,
commodious fellow. There were no angles on his temper to come in contact