Mr Glowry's friends, whom we have mentioned in
the first chapter, availed themselves of his return to pay him a
simultaneous visit. At the same time arrived Scythrop's friend and
fellow-collegian, the Honourable Mr Listless. Mr Glowry had discovered
this fashionable young gentleman in London, 'stretched on the rack of
a too easy chair,' and devoured with a gloomy and misanthropical _nil
curo_, and had pressed him so earnestly to take the benefit of the
pure country air, at Nightmare Abbey, that Mr Listless, finding it
would give him more trouble to refuse than to comply, summoned his
French valet, Fatout, and told him he was going to Lincolnshire. On
this simple hint, Fatout went to work, and the imperials were packed,
and the post-chariot was at the door, without the Honourable Mr
Listless having said or thought another syllable on the subject.
Mr and Mrs Hilary brought with them an orphan niece, a daughter of Mr
Glowry's youngest sister, who had made a runaway love-match with an
Irish officer. The lady's fortune disappeared in the first year: love,
by a natural consequence, disappeared in the second: the Irishman
himself, by a still more natural consequence, disappeared in the
third. Mr Glowry had allowed his sister an annuity, and she had lived
in retirement with her only daughter, whom, at her death, which had
recently happened, she commended to the care of Mrs Hilary.
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