s fancy. She
came to him smelling of sweet scents, with a slight rustling of silk, and
the sound of her expectant voice, saying, "Yes, dear?" as though she were
not bored. He remembered when he brought her first to Worsted Skeynes
thirty-four years ago, "That timid, and like a rose, but a lady every
hinch, the love!" as his old nurse had said.

He remembered her when George was born, like wax for whiteness and
transparency, with eyes that were all pupils, and a hovering smile. So
many other times he remembered her throughout those years, but never as a
woman faded, old; never as a woman of the past. Now that he had not got
her, for the first time Mr. Pendyce realised that she had not grown old,
that she was still to him "timid, and like a rose, but a lady every
hinch, the love!" And he could not bear this thought; it made him feel
so miserable and lonely in the lamplight, with the grey moths hovering
round, and the spaniel John asleep upon his foot.

So, taking his candle, he went up to bed. The doors that barred away the
servants' wing were closed. In all that great remaining space of house
his was the only candle, the only sounding footstep. Slowly he mounted
as he had mounted many thousand times, but never once like this, and
behind him, like a shadow, mounted the spaniel John.

And She that knows the hearts of men and dogs, the Mother from whom all
things come, to whom they all go home, was watching, and presently, when
they were laid, the one in his deserted bed, the other on blue linen,
propped against the door, She gathered them to sleep.

But Wednesday came, and with it Wednesday duties. They who have passed
the windows of the Stoics' Club and seen the Stoics sitting there have
haunting visions of the idle landed classes. These visions will not let
them sleep, will not let their tongues to cease from bitterness, for they
so long to lead that "idle" life themselves. But though in a misty land
illusions be our cherished lot, that we may all think falsely of our
neighbours and enjoy ourselves, the word "idle" is not at all the word.

Many and heavy tasks weighed on the Squire at Worsted Skeynes. There was
the visit to the stables to decide as to firing Beldame's hock, or
selling the new bay horse because he did not draw men fast enough, and
the vexed question of Bruggan's oats or Beal's, talked out with Benson,
in a leather belt and flannel shirt-sleeves, like a corpulent,
white-whiskered boy. Then