e other, containing
the hamlet of Redicote, lying on the Taunton high road,--Redicote,
where the post-office is placed, a town almost in itself, and one
which is now much more prosperous than Belton,--as the property when
it came to the first Amedroz had limits such as these, the family had
been considerable in the county. But these limits had been straitened
in the days of the grandfather and the father of Bernard Amedroz; and
he, when he married a Miss Winterfield of Taunton, was thought to
have done very well, in that mortgages were paid off the property
with his wife's money to such an extent as to leave him in clear
possession of an estate that gave him two thousand a year. As Mr.
Amedroz had no grand neighbours near him, as the place is remote
and the living therefore cheap, and as with this income there was
no question of annual visits to London, Mr. and Mrs. Amedroz might
have done very well with such of the good things of the world as had
fallen to their lot. And had the wife lived such would probably have
been the case; for the Winterfields were known to be prudent people.
But Mrs. Amedroz had died young, and things with Bernard Amedroz had
gone badly.

And yet the evil had not been so much with him as with that terrible
boy of his. The father had been nearly forty when he married. He had
then never done any good; but as neither had he done much harm, the
friends of the family had argued well of his future career. After
him, unless he should leave a son behind him, there would be no
Amedroz left among the Quantock hills; and by some arrangement
in respect to that Winterfield money which came to him on his
marriage,--the Winterfields having a long-dated connection with the
Beltons of old,--the Amedroz property was, at Bernard's marriage,
entailed back upon a distant Belton cousin, one Will Belton, whom
no one had seen for many years, but who was by blood nearer to the
squire, in default of children of his own, than any other of his
relatives. And now Will Belton was the heir to Belton Castle; for
Charles Amedroz, at the age of twenty-seven, had found the miseries
of the world to be too many for him, and had put an end to them and
to himself.

Charles had been a clever fellow,--a very clever fellow in the eyes
of his father. Bernard Amedroz knew that he himself was not a clever
fellow, and admired his son accordingly; and when Charles had been
expelled from Harrow for some boyish freak,--in his vengeance agai