without her. There would be no longer any cows kept, and painters
must come into the house, and there were difficulties about fuel.
She was not turned out exactly; but she went and established
herself in lonely lodgings at Cheltenham. Then Mary Masters, who
had lived for more than a dozen years at Bragton, went back to her
father's house in Dillsborough.

Any reader with an aptitude for family pedigrees will now
understand that Reginald, Master of Hoppet Hall, was first cousin
to the father of the Foreign Office paragon, and that he is
therefore the paragon's first cousin once removed. The relationship
is not very distant, but the two men, one of whom was a dozen years
older than the other, had not seen each other for more than twenty
years,--at a time when one of them was a big boy, and the other a
very little one; and during the greater part of that time a lawsuit
had been carried on between them in a very rigorous manner. It had
done much to injure both, and had created such a feeling of
hostility that no intercourse of any kind now existed between them.

It does not much concern us to know how far back should be dated
the beginning of the connection between the Morton family and that
of Mr. Masters, the attorney; but it is certain that the first
attorney of that name in Dillsborough became learned in the law
through the patronage of some former Morton. The father of the
present Gregory Masters, and the grandfather, had been thoroughly
trusted and employed by old Reginald Morton, and the former of the
two had made his will. Very much of the stewardship and management
of the property had been in their hands, and they had thriven as
honest men, but as men with a tolerably sharp eye to their own
interests. The late Mr. Masters had died a few years before the