I was wondering what on
earth would have happened to this estate if--if----" And he looked round
with a frown. "Even as it is, I barely make the two ends of it meet. As
to George, he's no more fit at present to manage it than you are; he'd
make a loss of thousands."

"I'm afraid George is too much in London. That's the reason I wondered
whether--I'm afraid he sees too much of----"

Mrs. Pendyce stopped; a flush suffused her cheeks; she had pinched
herself violently beneath the bedclothes.

"George," said Mr. Pendyce, pursuing his own thoughts, "has no gumption.
He'd never manage a man like Peacock--and you encourage him! He ought to
marry and settle down."

Mrs. Pendyce, the flush dying in her cheeks, said:

"George is very like poor Hubert."

Horace Pendyce drew his watch from beneath his pillow.

"Ah!" But he refrained from adding, "Your people!" for Hubert
Totteridge had not been dead a year. "Ten minutes to eight! You keep me
talking here; it's time I was in my bath."

Clad in pyjamas with a very wide blue stripe, grey-eyed, grey-moustached,
slim and erect, he paused at the door.

"The girls haven't a scrap of imagination. What do you think Bee said?
'I hope he hasn't lost his train.' Lost his train! Good God! and I
might have--I might have----" The Squire did not finish his sentence; no
words but what seemed to him violent and extreme would have fulfilled his
conception of the danger he had escaped, and it was against his nature
and his training to exaggerate a physical risk.

At breakfast he was more cordial than usual to Gregory, who was going up
by the first train, for as a rule Mr. Pendyce rather distrusted him, as
one would a wife's cousin, especially if he had a sense of humour.

"A very good fellow," he was wont to say of him, "but an out-and-out
Radical." It was the only label he could find for Gregory's
peculiarities.

Gregory departed without further allusion to the object of his visit. He
was driven to the station in a brougham by the first groom, and sat with
his hat off and his head at the open window, as if trying to get
something blown out of his brain. Indeed, throughout the whole of his
journey up to town he looked out of the window, and expressions half
humorous and half puzzled played on his face. Like a panorama slowly
unrolled, country house after country house, church after church,
appeared before his eyes in the autumn sunlight, among the hedgerows and
the covert