than has ever been seen since their day.  Squire Vancourt the elder, grandfather of the present heiress of Abbot’s Manor, had been a splendid specimen of ’the fine old English gentleman, all of the olden time,’ and his wife, one of the handsomest, as well as one of the kindest-hearted women that ever lived, had been justly proud of her husband, devoted to her children, and a true friend and benefactress to the neighbourhood.  Her four sons, two of whom were twins, all great strapping lads, built on their vigorous father’s model, were considered the best-looking young men in the county, and by their fond mother were judged as the best-hearted; but, as it often happens, Nature was freakish in their regard, and turned them all out wild colts of a baser breed than might have been expected from their unsullied parentage.  The eldest took to hard drinking and was killed at steeple-chasing; the second was drowned while bathing; one of the twins, named Frederick, the younger by a few minutes, after nearly falling into unnameable depths of degradation by gambling with certain ‘noble and exalted’ personages of renown, saved himself, as it were, by the skin of his teeth, through marriage with a rich American girl whose father was blessed with unlimited, oil-mines.  He was thereby enabled to wallow in wealth with an impaired digestion and shattered nervous power, while capricious Fate played him her usual trick in her usual way by denying him any heirs to his married millions.  His first-born brother, Robert, wedded for love, and chose as his mate a beautiful girl without a penny, whose grace and charm had dazzled the London world of fashion for about two seasons, and she had died at the age of twenty in giving birth to her first child, the girl whom her father had named Maryllia.

All these chances and changes of life, however, occurring to the leading family of the neighbourhood had left very little mark on St. Rest, which drowsed under the light shadow of the eastern hills by its clear flowing river, very much as it had always drowsed in the old days, and very much as it would always do even if London and Paris were consumed by unsuspected volcanoes.  The memory of the first ’old Squire,’—­who died peacefully in his bed all alone, his wife having passed away two years before him, and his two living twin sons being absent,—­was frequently mixed with stories of the other ‘old Squire’ Robert, the elder twin, who was killed in the hunting field,—­and indeed it often happened that some of the more ancient and garrulous villagers were not at all sure as to which was which.  The Manor had been shut up for ten years,—­the Manor ‘family’ had not been heard of during all that period, and the tenantry’s recollection of their late landlord, as well as of his one daughter, was more vague and confused than authentic.  The place had been ‘managed’ and the cottage rents collected by the detested agent Oliver Leach, a fact which did not sweeten such remembrance of the Vancourts as still existed in the minds of the people.