week. He
wanted, he said, to have a talk with Lady Dunstane. Evidently he had
railways on the brain, and Sir Lukin warned his wife to be guarded
against the speculative mania, and advise the man, if she could.

CHAPTER V

CONCERNING THE SCRUPULOUS GENTLEMAN WHO CAME TOO LATE

On the Saturday of his appointment Redworth arrived at Copsley, with a
shade deeper of the calculating look under his thick brows, habitual to
him latterly. He found Lady Dunstane at her desk, pen in hand, the paper
untouched; and there was an appearance of trouble about her somewhat
resembling his own, as he would have observed, had he been open-minded
enough to notice anything, except that she was writing a letter. He
begged her to continue it; he proposed to read a book till she was at
leisure.

'I have to write, and scarcely know how,' said she, clearing her face to
make the guest at home, and taking a chair by the fire, 'I would rather
chat for half an hour.'

She spoke of the weather, frosty, but tonic; bad for the last days of
hunting, good for the farmer and the country, let us hope.

Redworth nodded assent. It might be surmised that he was brooding over
those railways, in which he had embarked his fortune. Ah! those railways!
She was not long coming to the wailful exclamation upon them, both to
express her personal sorrow at the disfigurement of our dear England, and
lead to a little, modest, offering of a woman's counsel to the rash
adventurer; for thus could she serviceably put aside her perplexity
awhile. Those railways! When would there be peace in the land? Where one
single nook of shelter and escape from them! And the English, blunt as
their senses are to noise and hubbub, would be revelling in hisses,
shrieks, puffings and screeches, so that travelling would become an
intolerable affliction. 'I speak rather as an invalid,' she admitted; 'I
conjure up all sorts of horrors, the whistle in the night beneath one's
windows, and the smoke of trains defacing the landscape; hideous
accidents too. They will be wholesale and past help. Imagine a collision!
I have borne many changes with equanimity, I pretend to a certain degree
of philosophy, but this mania for cutting up the land does really cause
me to pity those who are to follow us. They will not see the England we
have seen. It will be patched and scored, disfigured . . . a sort of
barbarous Maori visage--England in a New Zealand mask. You may call it
the sentimental view. I