fellow, who, at two and twenty, was quite as well able to manage
the farm and everybody on it as his father had been before him.
He had got rid of all his relatives save two six days after his
father's funeral; and those two were stopping by general consent,
because it was signed, sealed, and delivered by those whom it
most concerned, that the younger woman, his cousin, pretty Sophie
Tarne, was to be married before the year was out to the present
Reuben Pemberthy, who had wooed her and won her consent when he
went down to her mother's house at King's Norton for a few days'
trip last summer. Being a steady, handsome fellow, who made love
in downright earnest, he impressed Sophie's eighteen years, and
was somewhat timidly but graciously accepted as an affianced suitor.
It was thought at King's Norton that Mrs. Tarne had done a better
stroke of business in the first year of her widowhood than her
late husband had done--always an unlucky wretch, Timothy--in the
whole course of his life. And now Sophie Tarne and her mother were
staying for a few days longer at Maythorpe Farm after the funeral.

Mrs. Tarne, having been a real Pemberthy before her unfortunate
marriage with the improvident draper of King's Norton, was quite
one of the family, and seemed more at home at Finchley than was
the new widow, Mrs. Pemberthy, a poor, unlucky lady, a victim to
a chronic state of twittering and jingling and twitching, but one
who, despite her shivers, had made the late Reuben a good wife,
and was a fair housekeeper even now, although superintending
housekeeping in jumps, like a a palsy-stricken kangaroo.

So Sophie and her bustling mother were of material assistance
to Mrs. Pemberthy; and the presence of Sophie in that house of
mourning--where the mourning had been speedily got over and business