Like many other things which have been declared to be impossible, this report of Captain James being attentive¹ to Miss Brooke turned out to be very true.

The mere² idea of her agent being on the slightest possible terms of acquaintance with the Dissenter⁴, the tradesman, the Birmingham democrat⁵, who had come to settle in our good, orthodox, aristocratic, and agricultural Hanbury, made my lady very uneasy. Miss Galindo’s misdemeanor in having taken Miss Bessy to live with her, faded into a mistake, a mere error of judgment⁶, in comparison with Captain James’s intimacy⁷ at Yeast⁸ House, as the Brookes called their ugly square-built farm. My lady talked herself quite into complacency with Miss Galindo, and even Miss Bessy was named by her, the first time I had ever been aware that my lady recognised her existence; but—I recollect⁹ it was a long rainy afternoon, and I sat with her ladyship, and we had time and opportunity for a long uninterrupted talk—whenever we had been silent for a{317} little while, she began again, with something like a wonder how it was that Captain James could ever have commenced an acquaintance with “that man Brooke.” My lady recapitulated¹⁰ all the times she could remember, that anything had occurred, or been said by Captain James which she could now understand as throwing light upon the subject.

“He said once that he was anxious to bring in the Norfolk system of cropping, and spoke¹¹ a good deal about Mr. Coke of Holkham (who, by the way, was no more a Coke than I am—collateral in the female line—which counts for little or nothing among the great old commoners’ families of pure blood), and his new ways of

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