"You will not accept their apology?" said the lawyer.
"Oh yes;--or rather, it is unnecessary. You may tell them that I have changed my mind, and that I will ask for no apology. As far as the paper is concerned, it will be better to let the thing die a natural death. I should never have troubled myself about the newspaper if the Bishop had not sent it to me. Indeed I had seen it before the Bishop sent it, and thought little or nothing of it. Animals will after their kind. The wasp stings, and the polecat stinks, and the lion tears its prey asunder. Such a paper as that of course follows its own bent. One would have thought that a bishop would have done the same."
"I may tell them that the action is withdrawn."
"Certainly; certainly. Tell them also that they will oblige me by putting in no apology. And as for your bill, I would prefer to pay it myself. I will exercise no anger against them. It is not they who in truth have injured me." As he returned home he was not altogether happy, feeling that the Bishop would escape him; but he made his wife happy by telling her the decision to which he had come.
THE absence of Dr. and Mrs. Wortle was peculiarly unfortunate on that afternoon, as a visitor rode over from a distance to make a call,--a visitor whom they both would have been very glad to welcome, but of whose coming Mrs. Wortle was not so delighted to hear when she was told by Mary that he had spent two or three hours at the Rectory. Mrs. Wortle began to think whether the visitor could have known of her intended absence and the Doctor's. That Mary had not known that the visitor was coming she was quite certain. Indeed she did not really suspect the visitor, who was one too ingenuous in his nature to preconcert so subtle and so wicked a scheme. The visitor, of course, had been Lord Carstairs.
"Was he here long?" asked Mrs. Wortle anxiously.
"Two or three hours, mamma. He rode over from Buttercup where he is staying, for a cricket match, and of course I got him some lunch."
"I should hope so," said the Doctor. "But I didn't think that Carstairs was so fond of the Momson lot as all that."
Mrs. Wortle at once doubted the declared purpose of this visit to Buttercup. Buttercup was more than half-way between Carstairs and Bowick.