“Very well, sir; I won’t no more,” said Matthew, retiring with mock humility.  But he had shot his bolt, and he supposed successfully.  He did not know what had taken place between his master and Miss Thoroughbung; but he did think that his speech might assist in preventing a repetition of the offer.

Miss Puffle gone off with the tenant’s son!  The news made matrimony doubly dangerous to him, and yet robbed him of the chief reason by which he was to have been driven to send her a letter.  He could not, at any rate, now fall back upon Miss Puffle.  And he thought that nothing would have induced Miss Thoroughbung to go off with one of the carters from the brewery.  Whatever faults she might have, they did not lie in that direction.  Champagne and ponies were, as faults, less deleterious.

Miss Puffle gone off with young Tazlehurst,—­a lady of fifty, with a young man of twenty-five! and she the reputed heiress of Snickham Manor!  It was a comfort to him as he remembered that Snickham Manor had been bought no longer ago than by the father of the present owner.  The Prospers been at Buston ever since the time of George the First.  You cannot make a silk purse out of a sow’s ear.  He had been ever assuring himself of that fact, which was now more of a fact than ever.  And fifty years old!  It was quite shocking.  With a steady middle-aged man like himself, and with the approval of her family, marriage might have been thought of.  But this harum-scarum young tenant’s son, who was in no respect a gentleman, whose only thought was of galloping over hedges and ditches, such an idea showed a state of mind which—­well, absolutely disgusted him.  Mr. Prosper, because he had grown old himself, could not endure to think that others, at his age, should retain a smack of their youth.  There are ladies besides Miss Puffle who like to ride across the country with a young man before them, or perhaps following, and never think much of their fifty years.

But the news certainly brought to him a great change of feelings, so that the letter to which he had devoted the preceding afternoon was put back into the letter-case, and was never finished.  And his mind immediately recurred to Miss Thoroughbung, and he bethought himself that the objection which he felt was, perhaps, in part frivolous.  At any rate, she was a better woman than Miss Puffle.  She certainly would run after no farmer’s son.  Though she she might be fond of champagne, it was, he thought, chiefly for other people.  Though she was ambitious of ponies, the ambition might be checked.  At any rate, she could pay for her own ponies, whereas Mr. Puffle was a very hale old man of seventy.  Puffle, he told himself, had married young, and might live for the next ten years, or twenty.  To Mr. Prosper, whose imagination did not fly far afield, the world afforded at present but two ladies.  These were Miss Puffle and Miss Thoroughbung, and as Miss Puffle had fallen out of the running, there seemed to be a walk-over for Miss Thoroughbung.