“Miss Leaf, I presume, ma’am.  The eldest?”

“I am the eldest Miss Leaf, and very glad to have an opportunity of thanking you for your long kindness to my nephew.  Elizabeth, give Mr. Ascott a chair.”

While doing so, and before her disappearance, Elizabeth took a rapid observation of the visitor, whose name and history were perfectly familiar to her.  Most small towns have their hero, and Stowbury’s was Peter Ascott, the grocer’s boy, the little fellow who had gone up to London to seek his fortune, and had, strange to say, found it.  Whether by industry or luck—­except that industry is luck, and luck is only another word for industry—­he had gradually risen to be a large city merchant, a dry-salter I conclude it would be called, with a handsome house, carriage, etc.  He had never revisited his native place, which indeed could not be expected of him, as he had no relations, but, when asked, as was not seldom of course, he subscribed liberally to its charities.

Altogether he was a decided hero in the place, and though people really knew very little about him, the less they knew the more they gossiped, holding him up to the rising generation as a modern Dick Whittington, and reverencing him extremely as one who had shed glory on his native town.  Even Elizabeth had conceived a great idea of Mr. Ascott.  When she saw this little fat man, coarse and common looking in spite of his good clothes and diamond ring, and in manner a curious mixture of pomposity and awkwardness, she laughed to herself, thinking what a very uninteresting individual it was about whom Stowbury had told so many interesting stories.  However, she went up to inform Miss Selina, and prevent her making her appearance before him in the usual Sunday dishabille in which she indulged when no visitors were expected.

After his first awkwardness, Mr. Peter Ascott became quite at his ease with Miss Leaf.  He began to talk—­not of Stowbury, that was tacitly ignored by both—­but of London, and then of “my house in Russell Square,” “my carriage,” “my servants”—­the inconvenience of keeping coachmen who would drink, and footmen who would not clean the plate properly; ending by what was a favorite moral axiom of his, that “wealth and position are heavy responsibilities.”

He himself seemed, however, not to have been quite overwhelmed by them; he was fat and flourishing—­with an acuteness and power in the upper half of his face which accounted for his having attained his present position.  The lower half, somehow Miss Leaf did not like it, she hardly knew why, though a physiognomist might have known.  For Peter Ascott had the underhanging, obstinate, sensual lip, the large throat—­bull-necked, as it has been called—­indications of that essentially animal nature which may be born with the nobleman as with the clown; which no education can refine, and no talent, though it may co-exist with it, can ever entirely remove.  He reminded one, perforce, of the rough old proverb; “You can’t make a silk purse out of a sow’s ear.”