an excellent husband for his sister-in-law, but that a man who earned a precarious living as a writer for a penny paper would be by no means so desirable a connection.  Stanbury, as he thought of this, declared to himself that he would not care two straws for Trevelyan in the matter, if he could see his way without other impediments.  But the other impediments were there in such strength and numbers as to make him feel that it could not have been intended by Fate that he should take to himself a wife.  Although those letters of his to the Daily Record had been so pre-eminently successful, he had never yet been able to earn by writing above twenty-five or thirty pounds a month.  If that might be continued to him he could live upon it himself; but, even with his moderate views, it would not suffice for himself and family.

He had told Trevelyan that while living as an expectant barrister he had no means of subsistence.  In this, as Trevelyan knew, he was not strictly correct.  There was an allowance of 100 pounds a year coming to him from the aunt whose residence at Exeter had induced him to devote himself to the Western Circuit.  His father had been a clergyman with a small living in Devonshire, and had now been dead some fifteen years.  His mother and two sisters were still living in a small cottage in his late father’s parish, on the interest of the money arising from a life insurance.  Some pittance from sixty to seventy pounds a year was all they had among them.  But there was a rich aunt, Miss Stanbury, to whom had come considerable wealth in a manner most romantic—­the little tale shall be told before this larger tale is completed—­and this aunt had undertaken to educate and place out in the world her nephew Hugh.  So Hugh had been sent to Harrow, and then to Oxford, where he had much displeased his aunt by not accomplishing great things, and then had been set down to make his fortune as a barrister in London, with an allowance of 100 pounds a year, his aunt having paid, moreover, certain fees for entrance, tuition, and the like.  The very hour in which Miss Stanbury learned that her nephew was writing for a penny newspaper she sent off a dispatch to tell him that he must give up her or the penny paper.  He replied by saying that he felt himself called upon to earn his bread in the only line from which, as it seemed to him, bread would be forthcoming.  By return of post he got another letter to say that he might draw for the quarter then becoming due, but that that would be the last.  And it was the last.

Stanbury made an ineffectual effort to induce his aunt to make over the allowance or at least a part of it to his mother and sisters, but the old lady paid no attention whatever to the request.  She never had given, and at that moment did not intend to give, a shilling to the widow and daughters of her brother.  Nor did she intend, or had she ever intended, to leave a shilling of her money to Hugh Stanbury, as she had very often told him.  The money was, at her death, to go back to the people from whom it had come to her.