and not always in the next street.  A hint occurred that it would be a gratification to him to be invited down, whether he could come or no; for holidays were expensive, and journeys by rail had to be thought over before they were undertaken; and when you are away from your post, you never knew who maybe supplanting you.  He did not promise that he could come, but frankly stated his susceptibility to the friendliness of an invitation.  The feeling indulged by Farmer Fleming in refusing to notice Anthony’s advance toward a reconciliation, was, on the whole, not creditable to him.  Spite is more often fattened than propitiated by penitence.  He may have thought besides (policy not being always a vacant space in revengeful acts) that Anthony was capable of something stronger and warmer, now that his humanity had been aroused.  The speculation is commonly perilous; but Farmer Fleming had the desperation of a man who has run slightly into debt, and has heard the first din of dunning, which to the unaccustomed imagination is fearful as bankruptcy (shorn of the horror of the word).  And, moreover, it was so wonderful to find Anthony displaying humanity at all, that anything might be expected of him.  “Let’s see what he will do,” thought the farmer in an interval of his wrath; and the wrath is very new which has none of these cool intervals.  The passions, do but watch them, are all more or less intermittent.

As it chanced, he acted sagaciously, for Anthony at last wrote to say that his home in London was cheerless, and that he intended to move into fresh and airier lodgings, where the presence of a discreet young housekeeper, who might wish to see London, and make acquaintance with the world, would be agreeable to him.  His project was that one of his nieces should fill this office, and he requested his brother-in-law to reflect on it, and to think of him as of a friend of the family, now and in the time to come.  Anthony spoke of the seductions of London quite unctuously.  Who could imagine this to be the letter of an old crabbed miser?  “Tell her,” he said, “there’s fruit at stalls at every street-corner all the year through—­oysters and whelks, if she likes—­winkles, lots of pictures in shops—­a sight of muslin and silks, and rides on omnibuses—­bands of all sorts, and now and then we can take a walk to see the military on horseback, if she’s for soldiers.”  Indeed, he joked quite comically in speaking of the famous horse-guards—­warriors who sit on their horses to be looked at, and do not mind it, because they are trained so thoroughly.  “Horse-guards blue, and horse-guards red,” he wrote—­“the blue only want boiling.”  There is reason to suppose that his disrespectful joke was not original in him, but it displayed his character in a fresh light.  Of course, if either of the girls was to go, Dahlia was the person.  The farmer commenced his usual process of sitting upon the idea.  That it would be policy to attach one of the family to this chirping old miser, he thought incontestable.