Excerpt from The Middle-Aged Lover, Vol. 2 of 2: A Story As we have seen, there was a coolness between the brothers Gardiner since the day when Will Gardiner had began to divine that his relation was making secret advances to the golden calf. So here was a new element in the competition. The clerical Gardiners were not so well off as the secular Gardiners, and this extravagance of the dinner was not quite warranted but the heads of the family had agreed that some exertion should be made for the children, and that if they were to strike at all, they must strike quickly. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.