and return to town."

"But stay with us this day--do--let me feel that we are friends. I
assure you poor Sidney's fate has been a load on my mind ever since he
left. You shall have the bed he slept in, and over which your mother
bent when she left him and me for the last time."

These words were said with so much feeling, that the adventurer wrung his
uncle's hand, and said, "Forgive me, I wronged you--I will be your
guest."

Mrs. Morton, strange to say, evinced no symptoms of ill-humour at the
news of the proffered hospitality. In fact, Miss Margaret had been so
eloquent in Philip's praise during his absence, that she suffered herself
to be favourably impressed. Her daughter, indeed, had obtained a sort of
ascendency over Mrs. M. and the whole house, ever since she had received
so excellent an offer. And, moreover, some people are like dogs--they
snarl at the ragged and fawn on the well-dressed. Mrs. Morton did not
object to a nephew _de facto_, she only objected to a nephew in _forma
pauperis_. The evening, therefore, passed more cheerfully than might
have been anticipated, though Philip found some difficulty in parrying
the many questions put to him on the past. He contented himself with
saying, as briefly as possible, that he had served in a foreign service,
and acquired what sufficed him for an independence; and then, with the
ease which a man picks up in the great world, turned the conversation to
the prospects of the family whose guest he was. Having listened with due
attention to Mrs. Morton's eulogies on Tom, who had been sent for, and
who drank the praises on his own gentility into a very large pair of
blushing ears,--also, to her self-felicitations on Miss Margaret's
marriage,--_item_, on the service rendered to the town by Mr. Roger, who