He did go over and shoot the coverts, and stayed for one night; but the visit was not very successful.  Aunt Polly would talk of the glories of the Plum-cum-Pippins rectory in a manner which implied that dear Julia’s escape from a fate which once threatened her had been quite providential.  When he alluded,—­as he did, but should not have done,—­to the young Smirkies, she spoke with almost ecstatic enthusiasm of the ‘dear children,’ Caldigate knowing the while that the eldest child must be at least sixteen.  And then, though Aunt Polly was kind to him, she was kind in an almost insulting manner,—­as though he were to be received for the sake of auld lang syne in spite of the step he had taken downwards in the world.  He did his best to bear all this with no more than an inward smile, telling himself that it behoved him as a man to allow her to have her little revenge.  But the smile was seen, and the more that was seen of it, the more often was he reminded that he had lost that place in the Babington elysium which might have been his, had he not been too foolish to know what was good for him.  And a hint was given that the Boltons a short time since had not been aristocratic, whereas it was proved to him from Burke’s Landed Gentry that the Smirkies had been established in Suffolk ever since Cromwell’s time.  No doubt their land had gone, but still there had been Smirkies.

‘How did you get on with them?’ his father asked, as he passed home through Cambridge.

’Much the same as usual.  Of course in such a family a son-in-law elect is more thought of than a useless married man.’

‘They snubbed you.’

’Aunt Polly snubbed me a little, and I don’t think I had quite so good a place for the shooting as in the old days.  But all that was to be expected.  I quite agree with Aunt Polly that family quarrels are foolish things.’

’I am not so sure.  Some people doom themselves to an infinity of annoyance because they won’t avoid the society of disagreeable people.  I don’t know that I have ever quarrelled with any one.  I have never intended to do so.  But when I find that a man or woman is not sympathetic I think it better to keep out of the way.’  That was the squire’s account of himself.  Those who knew him in the neighbourhood were accustomed to say that he had quarrelled with everybody about him.

In December the baby was born, just twelve months after the marriage, and there was great demonstrations of joy, and ringing of bells in the parishes of Utterden and Netherden.  The baby was a boy, and all was as it ought to be.  John Caldigate himself, when he came to look at his position and to understand the feeling of those around him, was astonished to find how strong was the feeling in his own favour, and how thoroughly the tenants had been outraged by the idea that the property might be made over to a more distant member of the family.  What was it to them who lived in the house at Folking?  Why