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The former was Mr. Creswell's case, in as far as anything except business can be said to have been active in his affairs. The "ladies" in the Helmingham district were utterly uninteresting to him, and he had made that fact so evident long ago that they had accepted it; of course regarding him as an "oddity," and much to be pitied; and since his nieces had taken up their abode, on the death of their father, Mr. Creswell's only brother, at Woolgreaves, a matrimonial development in Mr. Creswell's career had been regarded as an impossibility. The owner of Woolgreaves was voted by general feminine consent "a dear old thing," and a very good neighbour, and the ladies only hoped he might not have trouble before him with "that pickle, young Tom," and were glad to think no poor woman had been induced to put herself in for such a life as that of Tom's step-mother would have been.

Mr. Creswell's only brother had belonged, not to the "well-to-do" community, but, on the contrary, to that of the "neer-do-weels," and he had died without a shilling, heavily in debt, and leaving two helpless girls--sufficiently delicately nurtured to feel their destitution with keenness amounting to despair, and sufficiently "fashionably," i.e. ill, educated to be wholly incapable of helping themselves--to the mercy of the world. The contemplation of this contingency, for which he had plenty of leisure, for he died of a lingering illness, did not appear to have distressed Tom Creswell. He had believed in "luck" all his life, with the touching devotion of a selfish man who defines "luck" as the making of things comfortable for himself, and is not troubled with visions of, after him, the modern version of the deluge, which takes the squalid form of the pawnbroker's and the poor-house; and "luck" had lasted his time. It had even survived him, so far as his children were concerned, for his brother, who had quarrelled with him, more from policy and of deliberate interest, regarding him as a hopeless spendthrift, the helping of whom was a useless extravagance, than from anger or disgust, came to the aid of the widow and her children, when he found that things were very much worse than he had supposed they would prove to be.