his wife, the Squire displayed to
greater advantage than ever the shape of his long and narrow head; his
neck had grown conspicuously redder; his eyes, like those of an offended
swan, stabbed, as it were, at everything they saw.

It was not seldom that Mrs. Pendyce was summoned to the study to hear him
say: "I want to ask your advice. So-and-so has done such and such.... I
have made up my mind."

She came, therefore, in a few minutes. In compliance with his "Look at
that, Margery," she read the note, and gazed at him with distress in her
eyes, and he looked back at her with wrath in his. For this was tragedy.

Not to everyone is it given to take a wide view of things--to look over
the far, pale streams, the purple heather, and moonlit pools of the wild
marches, where reeds stand black against the sundown, and from long
distance comes the cry of a curlew--nor to everyone to gaze from steep
cliffs over the wine-dark, shadowy sea--or from high mountainsides to see
crowned chaos, smoking with mist, or gold-bright in the sun.

To most it is given to watch assiduously a row of houses, a back-yard,
or, like Mrs. and Mr. Pendyce, the green fields, trim coverts, and Scotch
garden of Worsted Skeynes. And on that horizon the citation of their
eldest son to appear in the Divorce Court loomed like a cloud, heavy with
destruction.

So far as such an event could be realised imagination at Worsted Skeynes
was not too vivid--it spelled ruin to an harmonious edifice of ideas and
prejudice and aspiration. It would be no use to say of that event, "What
does it matter? Let people think what they like, talk as they like." At
Worsted Skeynes (and Worsted Skeynes was every country house) there was
but one set of people, one church, one pack of hounds, one everything.
The importance of a clear escutcheon was too great. And they who had
lived together for thirty-four years looked at each other with a new
expression in their eyes; their feelings were for once the same. But
since it is always the man who has the nicer sense of honour, their
thoughts were not the same, for Mr. Pendyce was thinking: 'I won't
believe it--disgracing us all!' and Mrs. Pendyce was thinking: 'My boy!'

It was she who spoke first.

"Oh, Horace!"

The sound of her voice restored the Squire's fortitude.

"There you go, Margery! D'you mean to say you believe what this fellow
says? He ought to be horsewhipped. He knows my opinion of him.

"It's a piece