Then with another sigh he took up the Squire’s letter, and glanced through it.  Its length was considerable, but in substance it announced his acceptance of the arrangement proposed by Mr. Edward Cossey, and requested that he would prepare the necessary deeds to be submitted to his lawyers.  Mr. Quest read the letter absently enough, and threw it down with a little laugh.

“What a queer world it is,” he said to himself, “and what a ludicrous side there is to it all.  Here is Cossey advancing money to get a hold over Ida de la Molle, whom he means to marry if he can, and who is probably playing her own hand.  Here is Belle madly in love with Cossey, who will break her heart.  Here am I loving Belle, who hates me, and playing everybody’s game in order to advance my own, and become a respected member of a society I am superior to.  Here is the Squire blundering about like a walrus in a horse-pond, and fancying everything is being conducted for his sole advantage, and that all the world revolves round Honham Castle.  And there at the end of the chain is this female harpy, Edith Jones, otherwise d’Aubigne, alias the Tiger, gnawing at my vitals and holding my fortunes in her hand.

“Bah! it’s a queer world and full of combinations, but the worst of it is that plot as we will the solution of them does not rest with us, no —­not with us.”

CHAPTER XV

THE HAPPY DAYS

This is a troublesome world enough, but thanks to that mitigating fate which now and again interferes to our advantage, there do come to most of us times and periods of existence which, if they do not quite fulfil all the conditions of ideal happiness, yet go near enough to that end to permit in after days of our imagining that they did so.  I say to most of us, but in doing so I allude chiefly to those classes commonly known as the “upper,” by which is understood those who have enough bread to put into their mouths and clothes to warm them; those, too, who are not the present subjects of remorseless and hideous ailments, who are not daily agonised by the sight of their famished offspring; who are not doomed to beat out their lives against the madhouse bars, or to see their hearts’ beloved and their most cherished hope wither towards that cold space from whence no message comes.  For such unfortunates, and for their million-numbered kin upon the globe—­the victims of war, famine, slave trade, oppression, usury, over-population, and the curse of competition, the rays of light must be few indeed; few and far between, only just enough to save them from utter hopelessness.  And even to the favoured ones, the well warmed and well fed, who are to a great extent lifted by fortune or by their native strength and wit above the degradations of the world, this light of happiness is but as the gleam of stars, uncertain, fitful, and continually lost in clouds.  Only the utterly selfish or the utterly ignorant can be happy with the happiness of