searching every book on metals and minerals, till he had heaped up a
pile of volumes, whence be rang the changes on oxide, pyrites, and
carbonate, and octohedron crystals--names which poor Mrs. Frost had
heard but too often. At last it came to certainty that he had seen
the very masses containing ore; he would send one to-morrow to
Illershall to be analysed, and bring his friend Dobbs down to view
the spot.

'Not in my time,' interposed Lord Ormersfield. 'I would not wish for
a greater misfortune than the discovery of a mine on my property.'

'No wonder,' thought Mrs. Ponsonby, as she recollected Wheal
Salamanca and Wheal Catharine, and Wheal Dynevor, and all the other
wheals that had wheeled away all Cheveleigh and half Ormersfield,
till the last unfortunate wheal failed when the rope broke, and there
were no funds to buy a new one. No wonder Lord Ormersfield trembled
when he heard his son launch out into those easily-ascending
conjectural calculations, freely working sums in his head, so exactly
like the old Earl, his grandfather, that she could have laughed, but
for sympathy with the father, and anxiety to see how the son would
take the damp so vexatiously cast on his projects.

He made the gesture that Mrs. Frost called debonnaire--read on for
five minutes in silence, insisted on teaching his aunt the cause of
the colours in peacock ores, compared them to a pigeon's neck, and
talked of old Betty Gervas's tame pigeons; whence he proceeded to
memories of the days that he and Mary had spent together, and asked
which of their old haunts she had revisited. Had she been into the
nursery?