In any case he appears to have settled down very quietly in the old family house in the Ullerton market-place, where he married a respectable damsel of the Puritan school, some seven years after, and in which house, or in the neighbourhood whereof, he departed this life, with awful suddenness, one year after his marriage, leaving his son and heir, the reverend intestate.

And now, my dear Hawkehurst, you're a sharp fellow, and I daresay a good hand at guessing social conundrums; so perhaps you begin to see my idea." "I can't say I do." "My notion is, that Matthew Haygarth may possibly have married before he was fifty-three years of age.

Men of his stamp don't often live to that ripe age without being caught in matrimonial toils somehow or other.

It was in the days of Fleet marriages--in the days when young men about town were even more reckless and more likely to become the prey of feminine deception than they are now.

The fact that Matthew Haygarth revealed no such marriage is no conclusive evidence against my hypothesis.