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said. “We have all felt my sister’s loss most keenly; and as Mrs. Prowting observes, my brother’s children above all. There are no less than eleven little Austens, and the youngest has not yet attained a year of age.” 1
    Mrs. Prowting lifted up her eyes to Heaven, and then retreated for a moment behind her square of linen.
    “Mamma is thinking of William again,” Ann observed in a bored tone, “or perhaps of John. They were both of them odious little boys; I am sure I cannot count the times they teazed me unmercifully, and pulled my hair.”
    “Ann,”
Catherine whispered fiercely.
“Consider where you are.”
    But her sister continued insensible of danger.
    “Perhaps your brother will chuse a second wife, Miss Austen,” Ann suggested brightly, “should he ever return to Chawton. He will not find the ladies so high in the instep as in Kent! We are all easy here! I should set my cap at him myself—but as he is so
old,
I do not think there could be any fun in it. He shall do very well for Catherine.”
    “Minx,” Mr. Prowting said fondly. “She is a sad baggage, Miss Austen.”
    “Catherine cares nothing for flirtation or good jokes,” Ann added with a curl of her lip, “and would not object to so many children, provided she were left in peace with her harp. Lord, Mamma! Only conceive of the look on Jane Hinton’s face, when Catherine was presented as the Squire’s wife! How you should love to parade it over the Hintons, with their endless preaching about
entailments
and
usurpers.
”
    An appalled silence greeted this sally, but as Ann was engaged in adjusting her bodice lace, she failed to notice. Mrs. Prowting had flushed rosily, and her elder daughter could not lift up her eyes. It required only this united weakness, I supposed, for Ann’s impudence to rule the Prowting household.
    “The Hintons?” my mother innocently enquired. “I do not recollect the name. Are they also our neighbours?”
    “Mr. John-Knight Hinton is the son of our late rector, who was a most excellent man,” Prowting said with an appearance of discomfiture. “I wish that I could say the same of his son. But Jack Hinton is an indolent fellow, dissatisfied with his station in life, and unequal to improving it by either wit or exertion.”
    “You are too unkind, Papa.” Catherine’s countenance was suffused with a blush. “Mr. Hinton’s character is good, and his understanding—tho’ perhaps not brilliant—”
    “—is as high as you may safely look for a beau,” her sister observed waspishly.
    “Ann,”
Mrs. Prowting protested.
    “The Church would not do for him,” continued the magistrate with impatience, “—nor yet the Army; and as he is the youngest child and only son, Mrs. Austen, he has been much spoilt. Tho’ now fully five-and-thirty years of age if he is a day, Jack lives in idleness with his elder sister at Chawton Lodge, directly opposite the Great House.”
    My mother glanced from one Prowting to another in considerable puzzlement. “The Lodge did not pass to the new incumbent, I collect?”
    “Dear Mr. Papillon—such a kind gentleman, and so eloquent on the subject of forgiveness—rebuilt the old Rectory when Mrs. Knight gave him the Chawton living several years since,” Mrs. Prowting supplied. “But the Lodge was not in that lady’s gift; it was formerly the Dower House, and has passed through the female line to the Hinton family.”
    My mother frowned. “Then I must have seen the place not an hour ago, when you were so kind as to escort me to the Great House gates, Mr. Prowting. I wonder you did not mention it. And Mr. Hinton’s Christian name is John-Knight, you say? And he lives in the former Dower House? Are the family at all related to the Kentish Knights?”
    It was the Knight family that had adopted my brother Edward as their heir, and the Knight family that had inherited the manors of Chawton, Steventon, and Godmersham that Neddie now enjoyed. There had once been Knights in