“Humph!” muttered the bailiff in a surly tone.  “It’s a harder thing for her to marry a pauper, I should think, and to bring a regiment of children into the world, always wanting shoes and stockings.  But you’re a bachelor, you see, Mr. Fenton, and can’t be expected to know what shoes and stockings are.  Now there happens to be a friend of mine—­a steady, respectable, middle-aged man—­who worships the ground my girl walks on, and could make her mistress of as good a house as any within twenty miles of this, and give a home to her father in his old age, into the bargain; for I’m only a servant here, and it can’t be expected that I am to go on toiling and slaving about this place for ever.  I don’t say but what I’ve saved a few pounds, but I haven’t saved enough to keep me out of the workhouse.”

This seemed to Gilbert rather a selfish manner of looking at a daughter’s matrimonial prospects, and he ventured to hint as much in a polite way.  But the bailiff was immovable.

“What a young woman wants is a good home,” he said decisively; “whether she has the sense to know it herself, or whether she hasn’t, that’s what she’s got to look for in life.”

Gilbert had not spent many evenings at the Grange before he had the honour of being introduced to the estimable middle-aged suitor, whose claims Mr. Carley was always setting forth to his daughter.  He saw Stephen Whitelaw, and that individual’s colourless expressionless countenance, redeemed from total blankness only by the cunning visible in the small grey eyes, impressed him with instant distrust and dislike.

“God forbid that frank warm-hearted girl should ever be sacrificed to such a fellow as this,” he said to himself, as he sat on the opposite side of the hearth, smoking his cigar, and meditatively contemplating Mr. Whitelaw conversing in his slow solemn fashion with the man who was so eager to be his father-in-law.

In the course of that first evening of their acquaintance, Gilbert was surprised to see how often Stephen Whitelaw looked at him, with a strangely-attentive expression, that had something furtive in it, some hidden meaning, as it seemed to him.  Whenever Gilbert spoke, the farmer looked up at him, always with the same sharp inquisitive glance, the same cunning twinkle in his small eyes.  And every time he happened to look at Mr. Whitelaw during that evening, he found the watchful eyes turned towards him in the same unpleasant manner.  The sensation caused by this kind of surveillance on the part of the farmer was so obnoxious to him, that at parting he took occasion to speak of it in a friendly way.

“I fancy you and I must have met before to-night, Mr. Whitelaw,” he said; “or that you must have some notion to that effect.  You’ve looked at me with an amount of interest my personal merits could scarcely call for.”

“No, no, sir,” the farmer answered in his usual slow deliberate way; “it isn’t that; I never set eyes on you before I came into this room to-night.  But you see, Ellen, she’s interested in you, and I take an interest in any one she takes to.  And we’ve all of us thought so much about your searching for that poor young lady that’s missing, and taking such pains, and being so patient-like where another would have given in at the first set-off—­so, altogether, you’re a general object of interest, you see.”