Dr. Shand, the father, was a physician enjoying a considerable amount of provincial eminence in a small town in Essex.  Here he had certainly been a succesful man; for, with all the weight of such a family on his back, he had managed to save some money.  There had been small legacies from other Shands, and trifles of portion had come to them from the Potters, of whom Mrs. Shand had been one,—­Shand and Potter having been wholesale druggists in Smithfield.  The young Shands had generally lived a pleasant life; had gone to school,—­the eldest son, as we have seen, to the university also,—­and had had governesses, and ponies to ride, and had been great at dancing, and had shot arrows, and played Badminton, and been subject to but little domestic discipline.  They had lived crowded together in a great red-brick house, plenteously, roughly, quarrelling continually, but very fond of each other in their own way, and were known throughout that side of the country as a happy family.  The girls had always gloves and shoes for dancing, and the boys had enjoyed a considerable amount of shooting and hunting without owning either guns or horses of their own.  Now Dick was to go in quest of a fortune, and all the girls were stitching shirts for him, and were as happy as possible.  Not a word was said about his debts, and no one threw it in his teeth that he had failed to take a degree.  It was known of the Shands that they always made the best of everything.

When Caldigate got out of the railway carriage at Pollington, he was still melancholy with the remembrance of all that he had done and all that he had lost, and he expected to find something of the same feeling at his friend’s house.  But before he had been there an hour he was laughing with the girls as though such an enterprise as theirs was the best joke in the world.  And when a day and a night had passed, Mrs. Shand was deep among his shirts and socks, and had already given him much advice about flannel and soft soap.  ’I know Maria would like to go out with you,’ said the youngest daughter on the third day, a girl of twelve years old, who ought to have known better, and who, nevertheless, knew more than she ought to have done.

‘Indeed Maria would like nothing of the kind,’ said the young lady in question.

‘Only, Mr. Caldigate, of course you would have to marry her.’  Then the child was cuffed, and Maria declared that the proposed arrangement would suit neither her nor Mr. Caldigate in the least.  The eldest daughter, Harriet, was engaged to marry a young clergyman in the neighbourhood, which event, however, was to be postponed till he had got a living; and the second, Matilda, was under a cloud because she would persist in being in love with Lieutenant Postlethwaite, of the Dragoons, whose regiment was quartered in the town.  Maria was the third.  All these family secrets were told to him quite openly as well as the fact that Josh, the third son, was to become a farmer because he could not be got to learn the multiplication table.