“I am not going to marry all the family,” said Molly.

“Not Miss Matilda, for instance,” said her brother, laughing.

“No, especially not Matilda.  Joshua is quite as angry about his aunt as anybody here can be.  You’ll find that he is more of an Annesley than a Thoroughbung.”

“My dear,” said the mother, “your husband will, as a matter of course, think most of his own family.  And so ought you to do of his family, which will be yours.  A married woman should always think most of her husband’s family.”  In this way the mother told her daughter of her future duties; but behind the mother’s back Kate made a grimace, for the benefit of her sister Fanny, showing thereby her conviction that in a matter of blood,—­what she called being a gentleman,—­a Thoroughbung could not approach an Annesley.

“Mamma does not know it as yet,” Molly said afterward in privacy to her brother, “but you may take it for granted that Uncle Peter has been into Buntingford and has made an offer to Aunt Matilda.  I could tell it at once, because she looked so sharp at me to-day.  And Joshua says that he is sure it is so by the airs she gives herself.”

“You think she’ll have him?”

“Have him!  Of course she’ll have him.  Why shouldn’t she?  A wretched old maid living with a companion like that would have any one.”

“She has got a lot of money.”

“She’ll take care of her money, let her alone for that.

“And she’ll have his house to live in.  And there’ll be a jointure.  Of course, if there were to be children—­”

“Oh, bother!”

“Well, perhaps there will not.  But it will be just as bad.  We don’t mean even to visit them; we think it so very wicked.  And we shall tell them a bit of our mind as soon as the thing has been publicly declared.”

CHAPTER XXIV.

Harry Annesley’s misery.

The conversation which took place that evening between Harry and his father was more serious in its language, though not more important in its purpose.  “This is bad news, Harry,” said the rector.

“Yes, indeed, sir."’

“Your uncle, no doubt, can do as he pleases.”

“You mean as to the income he has allowed me?”

“As to the income!  As to the property itself.  It is bad waiting for dead men’s shoes.”

“And yet it is what everybody does in this world.  No one can say that I have been at all in a hurry to step into my uncle’s shoes.  It was he that first told you that he should never marry, and as the property had been entailed on me, he undertook to bring me up as his son.”

“So he did.”

“Not a doubt about it, sir.  But I had nothing to say to it.  As far as I understand, he has been allowing me two hundred and fifty pounds a year for the last dozen years.”

“Ever since you went to the Charter-house.”