48 WYLDER'S HAJVD.
be some bad secret. If he tries and fails, I suppose he
will be ruined. He will blast himself, and disgrace all
connected with him; and it is quite useless speaking to
him."
Perhaps if Rachel Lake had been in Belgravia, leading
a town life, the matter would have taken no such dark
coloring and portentous proportions. But living in a
small old house, in a dark glen, with no companion, and
little to occupy her, it was different.
She looked down the silent way he had so lately taken,
and repeated, rather bitterly: "My only brother! my
only brother! my only brother!"
That young lady was not quite a pauper, though she
may have thought so. She had just that symmetrical
three hundred pounds a year, which the famous Dean of
St. Patrick's tells us he so "often wished that he had
clear." She had had some money in the Funds besides,
still more insignificant; but this her brother Stanley had
borrowed and begged piecemeal, and the Consols were no
more. But though something of a nun in her way of life,
there was no germ of the old maid in her, and money was
not often in her thoughts. It was not a bad dot; and
her brother Stanley had about twice as much, and there-
fore was much better off than many a younger son of a
duke. Old General Lake had once had more than ten
thousand pounds a year, and lived, until the crash came,
in the style of a vicious old prince. It was a great break
up, and a worse fall for Rachel than for her brother, when
the plate, coaches, pictures, and "all the valuable effects"
of old Tiberius went to the hammer, and he himself van-
ished from his clubs and other haunts, and lived only —
a thin intermittent rumor — surmised to be in gaol, or in
Guernsey, and quite forgotten soon, and a little later ac-
tually dead and buried.