This woman was his sister, Mary Belton.  Something has been already said of this lady, which the reader may perhaps remember.  She was a year or two older than her brother, with whom she always lived, but she had none of those properties of youth which belonged to him in such abundance.  She was, indeed, a poor cripple, unable to walk beyond the limits of her own garden, feeble in health, dwarfed in stature, robbed of all the ordinary enjoyments of life by physical deficiencies, which made even the task of living a burden to her.  To eat was a pain, or at best a trouble.  Sleep would not comfort her in bed, and weariness during the day made it necessary that the hours passed in bed should be very long.  She was one of those whose lot in life drives us to marvel at the inequalities of human destiny, and to inquire curiously within ourselves whether future compensation is to be given.

It is said of those who are small and crooked-backed in their bodies, that their minds are equally cross-grained and their tempers as ungainly as their stature.  But no one had ever said this of Mary Belton.  Her friends, indeed, were very few in number; but those who knew her well loved her as they knew her, and there were three or four persons in the world who were ready at all times to swear that she was faultless.  It was the great happiness of her life that among those three or four her own brother was the foremost.  Will Belton’s love for his sister amounted almost to veneration, and his devotion to her was so great, that in all the affairs of his life he was prepared to make her comfort one of his first considerations.  And she, knowing this, had come to fear that she might be an embargo on his prosperity, and a stumbling-block in the way of his success.  It had occurred to her that he would have married earlier in life if she had not been, as it were, in his way; and she had threatened him playfully for she could be playful that he would leave him if he did not soon bring a mistress to Plaistow Hall.  ‘I will go to uncle Robert,’ she had said.  Now uncle Robert was the clergyman in Lincolnshire of whom mention has been made, and he was among those two or three who believed in Mary Belton with an implicit faith as was also his wife. ’ I will go to uncle Robert, Will, and then you will be driven to get a wife.’

’If my sister ever leaves my house, whether there be a wife in it or not,’ Will had answered, ‘I will never put trust in any woman again.’

Plaistow Manor-house or Hall was a fine brick mansion, built in the latter days of Tudor house architecture, with many gables and countless high chimneys very picturesque to the eye, but not in all respects comfortable as are the modern houses of the well-to-do squirearchy of England.  And, indeed, it was subject to certain objectionable characteristics which in some degree justified the scorn which Mr Amedroz intended to throw upon it when he declared it to be a farm-house.  The gardens belonging to it were large and excellent;