"No!" exclaimed Mr. Weatherhead, making his mouth into a perfect round O of astonishment.

"Ay; but he is, though."

"Next heir! Viscount Castlecombe, of Combe Park, and all the property!" gasped Jo.

"I don't know about the property. Only what's entailed, I suppose. But if Lucius was to die, Augustus would be next heir to the title, as sure as you stand there, Jo Weatherhead."

CHAPTER IV.

Probably of all the persons in Oldchester who knew or cared anything about the death of George Cheffington, May was the only one who did not immediately begin to make some calculations based on that event. The contingency of her father's succeeding to the family honours had not occurred to her. And her thoughts and feelings were now occupied with other things. But Oldchester gossips discussed it with gusto; or, at least, that small minority of them who interested themselves in the fortunes of the Castlecombe family. The old lord was little personally known in Oldchester, and the city had long outgrown any sense of the overweening importance of a Viscount Castlecombe of Combe Park, which it might have had a century earlier. To most of the rich manufacturers of the place (whether they really thought themselves "as good as a lord" or not) a lord whom they never beheld, and into whose house neither they nor their children had the remotest chance of being admitted, was, at any rate, genuinely uninteresting.

In the rural parts of the county it was otherwise. People there could not be indifferent to the domestic history of a large land-owner who resided during the greater part of the year on his estate. In many a country dwelling, from luxurious mansions down to mere labour