respected head and patriarch.  Mrs Walker, the most good-natured woman in Silverbridge, had acknowledged to her daughter that she could not understand it—­that she could not see anything at all in Grace Crawley.  Mr Walker had shrugged his shoulders and expressed a confident belief that Major Grantly had not a shilling of his own beyond his half-pay and his late wife’s fortune, which was only six thousand pounds.  Others, who were ill-natured, had declared that Grace Crawley was little better than a beggar, and that she could not possibly have acquired the manners of a gentlewoman.  Fletcher the butcher had wondered whether the major would pay his future father-in-law’s debts; and Dr Tempest, the old Rector of Silverbridge, whose four daughters were all as yet unmarried, had turned up his old nose, and had hinted that half-pay majors did not get caught in marriage so easily as that.

Such and such like had been the expressions of the opinions of men and women in Silverbridge.  But the matter had been discussed further afield than at Silverbridge, and had been allowed to intrude itself as a most unwelcome subject into the family conclave of the archdeacon’s rectory.  To those who have not as yet learned the fact from the public character and well-appreciated reputation of the man, let it be known that Archdeacon Grantly was at this time, as he had been for many years previously, Archdeacon of Barchester and Rector of Plumstead Episcopi.  A rich and prosperous man he had even been—­though he also had had his sore troubles, as we all have—­his having arisen chiefly from want of that higher ecclesiastical promotion which his soul had coveted, and for which the whole tenor of his life had especially fitted him.  Now, in his green old age, he had ceased to covet, but had not ceased to repine.  He had ceased to covet aught for himself, but still coveted much for his children; and for him such a marriage as this which was now suggested for his son, was encompassed almost with the bitterness of death.  ’I think it would kill me,’ he said to his wife; ’by heavens, I think it would be my death!’

A daughter of the archdeacon had made a splendid matrimonial alliance—­so splendid that its history was at the time known to all the aristocracy of the county, and had not been altogether forgotten by any of those who keep themselves well instructed in the details of the peerage.  Griselda Grantly had married Lord Dumbello, the eldest don of the Marquis of Hartletop—­than whom no English nobleman was more puissant, if broad acres, many castles, high title, and stars and ribbons are any sign of puissance—­and she was now, herself, Marchioness of Hartletop, with a little Lord Dumbello of her own.  The daughter’s visits to the parsonage of her father were of necessity rare, such necessity having come from her own altered sphere of life.  A Marchioness of Hartletop has special duties which will hardly permit her to devote herself frequently to the humdrum society of a clerical mother