The Doctor lifted his eyebrows a little.  He thought there was no fear.  Elsie was naturally what they call a man-hater, and there was very little danger of any sudden passion springing up between two such young persons.  Let him stay awhile; it gives her something to think about.—­So he stayed awhile, as we have seen.

The more Mr. Richard became acquainted with the family,—­that is, with the two persons of whom it consisted,—­the more favorably the idea of a permanent residence in the mansion-house seemed to impress him.  The estate was large,—­hundreds of acres, with woodlands and meadows of great value.  The father and daughter had been living quietly, and there could not be a doubt that the property which came through the Dudleys must have largely increased of late years.  It was evident enough that they had an abundant income, from the way in which Elsie’s caprices were indulged.  She had horses and carriages to suit herself; she sent to the great city for everything she wanted in the way of dress.  Even her diamonds—­and the young man knew something about these gems—­must be of considerable value; and yet she wore them carelessly, as it pleased her fancy.  She had precious old laces, too, almost worth their weight in diamonds,—­laces which had been snatched from altars in ancient Spanish cathedrals during the wars, and which it would not be safe to leave a duchess alone with for ten minutes.  The old house was fat with the deposits of rich generations which had gone before.  The famous “golden” fireset was a purchase of one of the family who had been in France during the Revolution, and must have come from a princely palace, if not from one of the royal residences.  As for silver, the iron closet which had been made in the dining-room wall was running over with it:  tea-kettles, coffee-pots, heavy-lidded tankards, chafing-dishes, punch-bowls, all that all the Dudleys had ever used, from the caudle-cup that used to be handed round the young mother’s chamber, and the porringer from which children scooped their bread-and-milk with spoons as solid as ingots, to that ominous vessel, on the upper shelf, far back in the dark, with a spout like a slender italic S, out of which the sick and dying, all along the last century, and since, had taken the last drops that passed their lips.  Without being much of a scholar, Dick could see well enough, too, that the books in the library had been ordered from the great London houses, whose imprint they bore, by persons that knew what was best and meant to have it.  A man does not require much learning to feel pretty sure, when he takes one of those solid, smooth, velvet-leaved quartos, say a Baskerville Addison, for instance, bound in red morocco, with a margin of gold, as rich as the embroidery of a prince’s collar, as Vandyck drew it,—­he need not know much to feel pretty sure that a score or two of shelves full of such books mean that it took a long purse, as well as a literary taste, to bring them together.