correction of the rest of the world, from kings
and cabinet ministers downward. Certain it
is that, when all accounts were balanced, no
man could bring any more specific accusation
against Luke Charlewood than that he had been
poor and now was rich, and that from being
rich he had always grown still richer. He had
lived single to a much later period in life than
is common in the class whence he sprang,
and he was already a thriving man when he
married the daughter of a prosperous timber-
merchant, with whom he had business relations.
His wife had borne him many children, but
they lost several in early infancy, and, at the
time when this story opens, their family
consisted of two sons and two daughters.
Penelope, aged twenty-seven, was the eldest of these;
her brother, Clement, was a year and a half
younger; and the remaining two, Walter and
Augusta, were aged respectively seventeen and
twenty.

Clement had for some time taken an active
share in his father's business, and during the
past year the style and title of the great firm
had been changed to Charlewood and Son;
though it continued to be known and spoken of
as Gandry and Charlewood. Clement Charlewood
threw all the strength of a strong character
into his daily pursuits. The vastness of the
operations undertaken by the firm, and the wide
and various portions of the civilised — nay, for
that matter, and uncivilised — world, over which
they extended, had to the young man's
imagination an element of wonder and grandeur
which redeemed them in his mind from mere
hard prosaic money-grinding. He would have
said to others, and even perhaps to himself,
that no human being ever existed who more
heartily despised the unpractical and romantic
than he. Nevertheless, Clement Charlewood
had his ideal. Such a standard of inflexible
and spotless integrity, unwearying industry,
and enlightened progress, as he carried in his
mind, no business house in Hammerham or
elsewhere had ever reached.

The youngest son, Walter, the spoiled idol
and darling of his mother, was as frivolous, vain,
and idle, as his brother was earnest, proud, and
energetic. The lad was not without some
lovable qualities, having, at times, impulses of
generosity, and a womanish emotional kind of
tenderness. But he had been humoured, petted,
and flattered, until nearly all that was good in
him was hidden under a mass of selfishness.
Of the two daughters, Penelope and Augusta,
the reader has already seen somewhat.

The house this family inhabited was a
handsome and luxurious one. A substantial red-
brick mansion, dating from the reign of Queen
Anne, and surrounded by gardens. If the
house had been a little further from the road,
and the lodge a little further from the house,
the general effect of the approach would have
been better. But the house, when first built,
had been surrounded by wide meadows, stretching
far beyond the garden fence. The modern
increase of Hammerham, and the spread of
wealth, had occasioned a mushroom growth of
villa residences all around the old mansion. The
soil, plentifully manured with bright new coin
of the realm, had brought forth an abundant
crop of fantastic dwellings. There were stucco
houses, stone houses, timber houses, brick
houses, iron houses. Houses built in the Italian
style, the Swiss style, the French style, the
Chinese style. Châlets and pagodas, campaniles
and châteaus, bearing much such resemblance
to the original edifices they professed to imitate,
as the animals in a toy Noah's Ark bear to
real live beasts, birds, and fishes. One generally
knew what they were meant for, as one
generally can distinguish the scarlet lion from
the orange tiger in the toy box. But there was
a class of houses (the Hammerham people were
fond of designating them as Elizabethian
cottages) which proved a snare and a pitfall to the
unwary stranger; so frequent was their
tendency to run into the pagoda on the one hand,
and the Swiss cow-house on the other. To none
of these varieties, however, did the dwelling of
the Charlewoods belong. It was known as
Bramley Manor, and was, as has been said, a fine
substantial family mansion, boasting a long
terrace walk shaded by noble old elm-trees, on
the garden side of the house. The elms and
the terrace-walk could scarcely have been had,
ready-made, for money. But, assuredly, few
things were wanting within or without Bramley
Manor, that money could purchase. The
gardens were cultivated with exquisite skill and
care; the hothouses were filled with choice and
rare plants; the stables with costly horses.
Every latest patented improvement in the way
of household comfort or luxury which Hammerham
produced from its thousand dingy resounding
workshops, found a place in Bramley Manor.

Indeed, its interior brightness and splendour
harmonised but little with the quaint sobriety
of its outward aspect, which, save for the
mellowing touch of time, and the plate-glass that
glittered in the long narrow casements, was
but little altered from that which it originally
wore a century and a half ago. There was only
one apartment that seemed properly to belong,
by the antique fashion of it, to the old house.
This was the dining-room, a somewhat low-
pitched but spacious room, lined with a very
finely carved oak wainscot. Before Mr. Charlewood's
time this had been barbarously covered
with a thick coating of whitewash, picked out
with blue. But that had now been removed,
and the dark wood was again revealed in all its
sombre richness. Mrs. Charlewood, indeed,
complained that no amount of wax candles
could light up her dining-room, and that, do
what she would, it remained gloomy. But
then Mrs. Charlewood had no sense of the
picturesque, and would, in her heart, have
preferred the whitewash picked out with blue — if
only she might have been permitted to add plenty
of gilding.

It was in this room that the good lady had
been standing, flattening her nose against the
window, as Penelope had remarked, and looking out