the homely Riversley circle of days: and this likewise
was set in the count of charges against my father. Our Continental
pilgrimage ended in a course of riotousness that he did not participate
in, and was entirely innocent of, but was held accountable for, because
he had been judged a sinner.

'I am ordered to say,' Janet wrote, scrupulously obeying the order,
'that if you will leave Paris and come home, and not delay in doing it,
your grandfather will receive you on the same footing as heretofore.'

As heretofore! in a letter from a young woman supposed to nourish a
softness!

I could not leave my father in Paris, alone; I dared not bring him to
London. In wrath at what I remembered, I replied that I was willing to
return to Riversley if my father should find a welcome as well.

Janet sent a few dry lines to summon me over in April, a pleasant month
on heath-lands when the Southwest sweeps them. The squire was dead. I
dropped my father at Bulsted. I could have sworn to the terms of the
Will; Mr. Burgin had little to teach me. Janet was the heiress; three
thousand pounds per annum fell to the lot of Harry Lepel Richmond, to
be paid out of the estate, and pass in reversion to his children, or to
Janet's should the aforesaid Harry die childless.

I was hard hit, and chagrined, but I was not at all angry, for I knew
what the Will meant. My aunt Dorothy supplied the interlining eagerly
to mollify the seeming cruelty. 'You have only to ask to have it all,
Harry.' The sturdy squire had done his utmost to forward his cherished
wishes after death. My aunt received five-and-twenty thousand pounds,
the sum she had thrown away. 'I promised that no money of mine should go
where the other went,' she said.

The surprise in store for me was to find how much this rough-worded old
man had been liked by his tenantry, his agents and servants. I spoke of
it to Janet. 'They loved him,' she said. 'No one who ever met him fairly
could help loving him.' They followed him to his grave in a body. From
what I chanced to hear among them, their squire was the man of their
hearts: in short, an Englishman of the kind which is perpetually
perishing out of the land. Janet expected me to be enthusiastic
likewise, or remorseful. She expected sympathy; she read me the long
list of his charities. I was reminded of Julia Bulsted commenting on
my father, with her this he did and that. 'He had plenty,' I said, and
Janet shut her lips. Her coldness was