“Ill-bred and pushing as ever,” quoth Mr. Marston, angrily, as he thrust the unwelcome letter into his pocket.  “This fellow, wallowing in wealth, without one nearer relative on earth than I, and associated more nearly still with me the—­pshaw! not affection—­the recollections of early and intimate companionship, leaves me unaided, for years of desertion and suffering, to the buffetings of the world, and the troubles of all but overwhelming pecuniary difficulties, and now, with the cool confidence of one entitled to respect and welcome, invites himself to my house.  Coming here,” he continued, after a gloomy pause, and still pacing slowly towards the house, “to collect amusing materials for next season’s gossip—­stories about the married Benedick—­the bankrupt beau—­the outcast tenant of a Cheshire wilderness”; and, as he said this, he looked at the neglected prospect before him with an eye almost of hatred.  “Aye, to see the nakedness of the land is he coming, but he shall be disappointed.  His money may buy him a cordial welcome at an inn, but curse me if it shall purchase him a reception here.”

He again opened and glanced through the letter.

“Aye, purposely put in such a way that I can’t decline it without affronting him,” he continued doggedly.  “Well, then, he has no one to blame but himself—­affronted he shall be; I shall effectually put an end to this humorous excursion.  Egad, it is rather hard if a man cannot keep his poverty to himself.”

Sir Wynston Berkley was a baronet of large fortune—­a selfish, fashionable man, and an inveterate bachelor.  He and Marston had been schoolfellows, and the violent and implacable temper of the latter had as little impressed his companion with feelings of regard, as the frivolity and selfishness of the baronet had won the esteem of his relative.  As boys, they had little in common upon which to rest the basis of a friendship, or even a mutual liking.  Berkley was gay, cold, and satirical; his cousin—­for cousins they were—­was jealous, haughty, and relentless.  Their negative disinclination to one another’s society, not unnaturally engendered by uncongenial and unamiable dispositions, had for a time given place to actual hostility, while the two young men were at Oxford.  In some intrigue, Marston discovered in his cousin a too-successful rival; the consequence was, a bitter and furious quarrel, which, but for the prompt and peremptory interference of friends, Marston would undoubtedly have pushed to a bloody issue.  Time had, however, healed this rupture, and the young men came to regard one another with the same feelings, and eventually to re-establish the same sort of cold and indifferent intimacy which had subsisted between them before their angry collision.