Sir Miles's intentions. Too delicate himself to sound them, he had
prevailed upon the earl, who was well acquainted with Sir Miles, to take
Laughton in his way to his own seat in Dorsetshire, and, without
betraying the grounds of his interest in the question, learn carelessly,
as it were, the views of the wealthy man. The result had been a severe
and terrible disappointment. Sir Miles had then fully determined upon
constituting Lucretia his heiress; and with the usual openness of his
character, he had plainly said so upon the very first covert and polished
allusion to the subject which the earl slyly made. This discovery, in
breaking off all hopes of a union with Lady Mary Stanville, had crushed
more than mercenary expectations. It affected, through his heart,
Vernon's health and spirits; it rankled deep, and was resented at first
as a fatal injury. But Vernon's native nobility of disposition gradually
softened an indignation which his reason convinced him was groundless and
unjust. Sir Miles had never encouraged the expectations which Vernon's
family and himself had unthinkingly formed. The baronet was master of
his own fortune, and after all, was it not more natural that he should
prefer the child he had brought up and reared, to a distant relation,
little more than an acquaintance, simply because man succeeded to man in
the mouldy pedigree of the St. Johns? And, Mary fairly lost to him, his
constitutional indifference to money, a certain French levity of temper,
a persuasion that his life was nearing its wasted close, had left him
without regret, as without resentment, at his kinsman's decision. His
boyish affection for the hearty, generous old gentleman returned, and
though he abhorred the country, he had, without a single interested
thought or calculation, cordially accepted the baronet's hospitable
overtures, and deserted, for the wilds of Hampshire, "the sweet shady
side of Pall-Mall."

We may now enter the drawing-room at Laughton, in which were already