ken urn, an Ephedrus, like that
Adulterer who at the finish tripped the Conqueror of Troy. He read it
at a glance, catching its import rather by intuition than by any slavish
following of the written characters. If earth was darkness at the core,
and dust and ashes all that is, there was no trace of it in his face.
He talked gaily, he fulfilled the duties of a host with all his charm of
manner, he sped two guests who were leaving that morning with all his
usual courtesy. After that he ordered his horse, and telling Lady
Blandamer that he might not be back to lunch, he set out for one of
those slow solitary rides on the estate that often seemed congenial to
his mood. He rode along by narrow lanes and bridle-paths, not
forgetting a kindly greeting to men who touched their hats, or women who
dropped a curtsey, but all the while he thought.

The letter had sent his memory back to another black day, more than
twenty years before, when he had quarrelled with his grandfather. It
was in his second year at Oxford, when as an undergraduate he first felt
it his duty to set the whole world in order. He held strong views as to
the mismanagement of the Fording estates; and as a scholar and man of
the world, had thought it weakness to shirk the expression of them. The
timber was being neglected, there was no thinning and no planting. The
old-fashioned farmhouses were being let fall into disrepair, and then
replaced by parsimonious eaveless buildings; the very grazing in the
park was let, and fallow-deer and red-deer were jostled by sheep and
common mongrel cows. The question of the cows had galled him till he
was driven to remonstrate strongly with his grandfather. There had
never been much love lost between the pair, and on this occasion the
young man found the old man strangely out of sympathy with suggestions
of reform.

"Thank you," old Lord Blandamer had said; "I have heard all you have to
say. You have eased your mind, and now you can go back to Oxford in
peace. I have managed Fording for forty years, and feel myself
perfectly competent to manage it for forty years more. I don't quite
see what concern you have in the matter. What business is it of yours?"

"You don't see what concern I have in it," said the reformer
impetuously; "you don't know what business it is of mine? Why, damage
is being done here that will take a lifetime to repair."

A man must be on good terms with his heir not to dislike the idea of