to one of that noble family—to a Vipont—that the dear child will owe her restoration to my embrace! Bless you, Sir!"
"I hope I have done right," said George Vipont Morley, as he mounted his horse. "I must have done right, surely!" he said, again, when he was on the high-road. "I fear that I have not done right," he said, a third time, as the face of Mrs. Crane began to haunt him; and when, at sunset, he reached his home, tired out, horse and man, with an unusually long ride, and the green water-bank on which he had overheard poor Waife's simple grace and joyous babble came in sight, "After all," he said, dolefully, "it was no business of mine. I meant well, but—" His little sister ran to the gate to greet him. "Yes, I did quite right. How should I like my sister to be roving the country, and acting at Literary Institutes with a poodle dog? Quite tight. Kiss me, Jane!"
CHAPTER XVIII.
The scene shifts back to Gatesboro', the forenoon of the day succeeding the memorable Exhibition at the Institute of that learned town. Mr. Hartopp was in the little parlor behind his country-house, his hours of business much broken into by those intruders who deem no time unseasonable for the indulgence of curiosity, the interchange of thought, or the interests of general humanity and of national enlightenment. The excitement produced on the previous evening by Mr. Chapman, Sophy, and Sir Isaac, was greatly on the increase. Persons who had seen them naturally called on the Mayor to talk over the Exhibition. Persons who had not seen them still more naturally dropped in just to learn what was really Mr. Mayor's private opinion. The little parlor was thronged by a regular levee. There was the proprietor of a dismal building, still called "The Theatre," which was seldom let except at election-time, when it was hired by the popular candidate for the delivery of those harangues upon liberty and conscience, tyranny and oppression, which furnish the staple of declamation equally to the dramatist and the orator. There was also the landlord of the Royal Hotel, who had lately built to his house "The City Concert Room"—a superb apartment, but a losing speculation. There, too, were
