On the morning after his arrival Brooke Burgess had declared aloud in Miss Stanbury’s parlour that he was going over to the bank to see his uncle.  Now there was in this almost a breach of contract.  Miss Stanbury, when she invited the young man to Exeter, had stipulated that there should be no intercourse between her house and the bank.  ’Of course, I shall not need to know where you go or where you don’t go,’ she had written; ’but after all that has passed there must not be any positive intercourse between my house and the bank And now he had spoken of going over to C and B, as he called them, with the utmost indifference.  Miss Stanbury had looked very grave, but had said nothing.  She had determined to be on her guard, so that she should not be driven to quarrel with Brooke if she could avoid it.

Bartholomew Burgess was a tall, thin, ill-tempered old man, as well-known in Exeter as the cathedral, and respected after a fashion.  No one liked him.  He said ill-natured things of all his neighbours, and had never earned any reputation for doing good-natured acts.  But he had lived in Exeter for nearly seventy years, and had achieved that sort of esteem which comes from long tenure.  And he had committed no great iniquities in the course of his fifty years of business.  The bank had never stopped payment, and he had robbed no one.  He had not swallowed up widows and orphans, and had done his work in the firm of Cropper and Burgess after the old-fashioned safe manner, which leads neither to riches nor to ruin.  Therefore he was respected.  But he was a discontented, sour old man, who believed himself to have been injured by all his own friends, who disliked his own partners because they had bought that which had, at any rate, never belonged to him and whose strongest passion it was to hate Miss Stanbury of the Close.

‘She’s got a parson by the hand now,’ said the uncle, as he continued his caution to the nephew.

‘There was a clergyman there last night.’

’No doubt, and she’ll play him off against you, and you against him; and then she’ll throw you both over.  I know her.’

‘She has got a right to do what she likes with her own, Uncle Barty.’

’And how did she get it?  Never mind.  I’m not going to set you against her, if you’re her favourite for the moment.  She has a niece with her there hasn’t she?’

‘One of her brother’s daughters.’

‘They say she’s going to make that clergyman marry her.’

‘What, Mr Gibson?’

’Yes.  They tell me he was as good as engaged to another girl, one of the Frenches of Heavitree.  And therefore dear Jemima could do nothing better than interfere.  When she has succeeded in breaking the girl’s heart—­’

‘Which girl’s heart, Uncle Barty?’

’The girl the man was to have married; when that’s done she’ll throw Gibson over.  You’ll see.  She’ll refuse to give the girl a shilling.  She took the girl’s brother by the hand ever so long, and then she threw him over.  And she’ll throw the girl over too, and send her back to the place she came from.  And then she’ll throw you over.’