e
wrote, "I have found out nothing; we may still hope that there is
nothing to find out."

In all those long years he consoled himself by the thought that he was
bearing expatriation for the honour of the family, that he was absenting
himself so that his grandfather might find the less temptation to drag
the nebuly coat in the mire. To make a fetish of family was a tradition
with Blandamers, and the heir as he set out on his travels, with the
romance of early youth about him, dedicated himself to the nebuly coat,
with a vow to "serve and preserve" as faithfully as any ever taken by
Templar.

Last of all the old lord passed away. He never carried out his threat
of disinheritance, but died intestate, and thus the grandson came to his
own. The new Lord Blandamer was no longer young when he returned; years
of wild travel had hardened his face, and made his heart self-reliant,
but he came back as romantic as he went away. For Nature, if she once
endows man or woman with romance, gives them so rich a store of it as
shall last them, life through, unto the end. In sickness or health, in
poverty or riches, through middle age and old age, through loss of hair
and loss of teeth, under wrinkled face and gouty limbs, under
crow's-feet and double chins, under all the least romantic and most
sordid malaisances of life, romance endures to the end. Its price is
altogether above rubies; it can never be taken away from those that have
it, and those that have it not, can never acquire it for money, nor by
the most utter toil--no, nor ever arrive at the very faintest
comprehension of it.

The new lord had come back to Fording full of splendid purpose. He was
tired of wandering; he would marry; he would settle down and enjoy his
own; he would seek the good of the people, and make his great estates an
example among landowners. And then within three weeks he had learned
that there was a pretender to the throne, that in Cullerne there was a
visionary who claimed to be the very Lord Blandamer. He had had this
wretched man pointed out to him once in the street--a broken-down fellow
who was trailing the cognisance of all the Blandamers in the mud, till
the very boys called him Old Nebuly. Was he to fight for land, and
house, and title, to fight for everything, with a man like that? And
yet it might come to fighting, for within a little time he knew that
this was the heir who had been the intangible shadow of his
grandmother's life a