way. Don't, there's a good fellow,
don't fidget about the steward's books and the rent-day. Here! here's a
bunch of keys they gave me last night: one of them opens the room where
the steward's books are; go in and read them till I come back. I give
you my sacred word of honor I'll settle it all with Pedgift before you
see me again."

"One moment," interposed Midwinter, stopping him resolutely on his way
out to the carriage. "I say nothing against Mr. Pedgift's fitness to
possess your confidence, for I know nothing to justify me in distrusting
him. But he has not introduced himself to your notice in a very delicate
way; and he has not acknowledged (what is quite clear to my mind) that
he knew of Mr. Darch's unfriendly feeling toward you when he wrote. Wait
a little before you go to this stranger; wait till we can talk it over
together to-night."

"Wait!" replied Allan. "Haven't I told you that I always strike while
the iron's hot? Trust my eye for character, old boy, I'll look Pedgift
through and through, and act accordingly. Don't keep me any longer, for
Heaven's sake. I'm in a fine humor for tackling the resident gentry; and
if I don't go at once, I'm afraid it may wear off."

With that excellent reason for being in a hurry, Allan boisterously
broke away. Before it was possible to stop him again, he had jumped into
the carriage and had left the house.

IV. THE MARCH OF EVENTS.

Midwinter's face darkened when the last trace of the carriage had
disappeared from view. "I have done my best," he said, as he turned back
gloomily into the house "If Mr. Brock himself were here, Mr. Brock could
do no more!"

He looked at the bunch of keys which Allan had thrust into his hand,
and a sudden longing to put himself to the test over the steward's books
took possession of his sensitive self-tormenting nature. Inquiring his
way to the room in which the various movables of the steward's office
had been provisionally placed after the letting of the cottage, he sat
down at the desk, and tried how his own unaided capacity would guide him
through the business records of the Thorpe Ambrose estate. The result
exposed his own ignorance unanswerably before his own eyes. The ledgers
bewildered him; the leases, the plans, and even the correspondence
itself, might have been written, for all he could understand of them,
in an unknown tongue. His memory reverted bitterly as he left the room
again to his two years' solitary self-instru