been left to face the world together. Sir William Elsmere and his
nephew's wife had not much in common, and rarely concerned themselves
with each other. Mrs. Elsmere was an Irishwoman by birth, with
irregular Irish ways, and a passion for strange garments, which
made her the dread of the conventional English squire; and, after
she left the vicarage with her son, she and her husband's uncle met
no more. But when he died it was found that the old man's sense
of kinship, acting blindly and irrationally, but with a slow
inevitableness and certainty, had stirred in him at the last in
behalf of his great-nephew. He left him a money legacy, the interest
of which was to be administered by his mother till his majority,
and in a letter addressed to his heir he directed that, should the
boy on attaining manhood show any disposition to enter the Church,
all possible steps were to be taken to endow him with the family
living of Murewell, which had been his father's, and which at the
time of the old Baronet's death was occupied by another connection
of the family, already well stricken in years.

Mowbray Elsmere had been hardly on speaking terms with his cousin
Edward, and was neither amiable nor generous, but his father knew
that the tenacious Elsmere instinct was to be depended on for the
fulfillment of his wishes. And so it proved. No sooner was his
father dead, than Sir Mowbray curtly communicated his instructions
to Mrs. Elsmere, then living at the town of Harden for the sake of
the great public school recently transported there. She was to
inform him, when the right moment arrived, if it was the boy's wish,
to enter the Church, and meanwhile he referred her to his lawyers
for particulars of such immediate benefits as were secured to her
under the late Baronet's will.