his father could not have sustained such an insult as was now, for the first time, offered to one of his house, unless he had subjected himself to it by accepting of an employment under the present system.  Sir Everard had no doubt that he now both saw and felt the magnitude of this error, and it should be his (Sir Everard’s) business, to take care that the cause of his regret should not extend itself to pecuniary consequences.  It was enough for a Waverley to have sustained the public disgrace; the patrimonial injury could easily be obviated by the head of their family.  But it was both the opinion of Mr. Richard Waverley and his own, that Edward, the representative of the family of Waverley-Honour, should not remain in a situation which subjected him also to such treatment as that with which his father had been stigmatized.  He requested his nephew therefore to take the fittest, and, at the same time, the most speedy opportunity, of transmitting his resignation to the War-Office, and hinted, moreover, that little ceremony was necessary where so little had been used to his father.  He sent multitudinous greetings to the Baron of Bradwardine.

A letter from Aunt Rachel spoke out even more plainly.  She considered the disgrace of brother Richard as the just reward of his forfeiting his allegiance to a lawful, though exiled sovereign, and taking the oaths to an alien; a concession which her grandfather, Sir Nigel Waverley, refused to make, either to the Roundhead Parliament or to Cromwell, when his life and fortune stood in the utmost extremity.  She hoped her dear Edward would follow the footsteps of his ancestors, and as speedily as possible get rid of the badge of servitude to the usurping family, and regard the wrongs sustained by his father as an admonition from Heaven, that every desertion of the line of loyalty becomes its own punishment.  She also concluded with her respects to Mr. Bradwardine, and begged Waverley would inform her whether his daughter, Miss Rose, was old enough to wear a pair of very handsome ear-rings, which she proposed to send as a token of her affection.  The good lady also desired to be informed whether Mr. Bradwardine took as much Scotch snuff, and danced as unweariedly, as he did when he was at Waverley-Honour about thirty years ago.

These letters, as might have been expected, highly excited Waverley’s indignation.  From the desultory style of his studies, he had not any fixed political opinion to place in opposition to the movements of indignation which he felt at his father’s supposed wrongs.  Of the real cause of his disgrace, Edward was totally ignorant; nor had his habits at all led him to investigate the politics of the period in which he lived, or remark the intrigues in which his father had been so actively engaged.  Indeed, any impressions which he had accidentally adopted concerning the parties of the times, were (owing to the society in which he had lived at Waverley-Honour) of a nature rather unfavourable to the existing government