For many years after the old man’s death, Lady Ushant, who was then a widow, was allowed to live at Bragton.  She was herself childless, and being now robbed of her great-nephews and nieces, took a little girl to live with her, named Mary Masters.  It was a very desolate house in those days, but the old lady was careful as to the education of the child, and did her best to make the home happy for her.  Some two or three years before the commencement of this story there arose a difference between the manager of the property and Lady Ushant, and she was made to understand, after some half-courteous manner, that Bragton house and park would do better without her.  There would be no longer any cows kept, and painters must come into the house, and there were difficulties about fuel.  She was not turned out exactly; but she went and established herself in lonely lodgings at Cheltenham.  Then Mary Masters, who had lived for more than a dozen years at Bragton, went back to her father’s house in Dillsborough.

Any reader with an aptitude for family pedigrees will now understand that Reginald, Master of Hoppet Hall, was first cousin to the father of the Foreign Office paragon, and that he is therefore the paragon’s first cousin once removed.  The relationship is not very distant, but the two men, one of whom was a dozen years older than the other, had not seen each other for more than twenty years,—­at a time when one of them was a big boy, and the other a very little one; and during the greater part of that time a lawsuit had been carried on between them in a very rigorous manner.  It had done much to injure both, and had created such a feeling of hostility that no intercourse of any kind now existed between them.

It does not much concern us to know how far back should be dated the beginning of the connection between the Morton family and that of Mr. Masters, the attorney; but it is certain that the first attorney of that name in Dillsborough became learned in the law through the patronage of some former Morton.  The father of the present Gregory Masters, and the grandfather, had been thoroughly trusted and employed by old Reginald Morton, and the former of the two had made his will.  Very much of the stewardship and management of the property had been in their hands, and they had thriven as honest men, but as men with a tolerably sharp eye to their own interests.  The late Mr. Masters had died a few years before the squire, and the present attorney had seemed to succeed to these family blessings.  But the whole order of things became changed.  Within a few weeks of the squire’s death Mr. Masters found that he was to be entrusted no further with the affairs of the property, but that, in lieu of such care, was thrown upon him the task of defending the will which he had made against the owner of the estate.  His father and grandfather had contrived between them to establish a fairly good business, independently of Bragton, which business, of course,