‘A bullet may hit him,’ said Mrs. Nicholson with much acerbity. ‘That’s my best hope.’
Then Merton bowed her out.
‘The old woman will never let the girl marry anybody, except some adventurer, who squares her by giving her the full value of her allowance out of the estate,’ thought Merton, adding ‘I wonder how much it is! Six figures is anything between a hundred thousand and a million!’
The man he had thought of sending down to divert Miss Monypenny’s affections from the young doctor was Jephson, the History coach, at that hour waiting for a professorship to enable him to marry Miss Willoughby.
However, he dismissed Mrs. Nicholson and her ward from his mind. About a fortnight later Merton received a letter directed in an uneducated hand. ‘Another of the agricultural classes,’ he thought, but, looking at the close of the epistle, he saw the name of Eliza Nicholson. She wrote:
‘Sir,—Barbara has been at her glass ball, and seen him being carried on board a ship. If she is right, and she is not always wrong, he is on his way home. Though I will never give my consent, this spells botheration for me. You can send down your young man that cures by teleopathy, a thing that has come up since my time. He can stay at the Perch, and take a fishing rod, then they are safe to meet. I trust him no more than the rest, but she may fall between two stools, if the doctor does come home.
‘Your obedient servant,
‘Eliza Nicholson.’
‘Merely to keep one’s hand in,’ thought Merton, ‘in the present disappointing slackness of business, I’ll try to see Jephson. I don’t like or trust him. I don’t think he is the man for Miss Willoughby. So, if he ousts the doctor, and catches the heiress, why “there was more lost at Shirramuir,” as Logan says.’
Merton managed to go up to Oxford, and called on Jephson. He found him anxious about a good, quiet, cheap place for study.
‘Do you fish?’ asked Merton.
‘When I get the chance,’ said Jephson.