, exact in the
performance of all his duties. As High Sheriff he filled his term of
office and discharged it adequately, but without ostentation.
Respecting wealth, but not greatly caring for it--as why should he?--every
year without effort he put aside a thousand or two. Men liked him, in
spite of his shyness: his good manners hiding a certain fastidiousness of
which he was aware without being at all proud of it. No one had ever
treated him with familiarity. One or two at the most called him friend,
and these probably enjoyed a deeper friendship than they knew.
Everyone felt him to be, behind his reserve, a good fellow.

Regularly thrice a week he drove down in his phaeton to the small country
station at the foot of his park, and caught the 10.27 up-train: regularly
as the train started he lit the cigar which, carefully smoked, was
regularly three-parts consumed by the time he crossed the M---- viaduct;
and regularly, as he lit it, he was conscious of a faint feeling of
resentment at the presence of Sir John Crang.

Nine mornings out of ten, Sir John Crang (who lived two stations down the
line) would be his fellow-traveller; and, three times out of five, his
only companion. Sir John was an ex-Civil Servant, knighted for what were
known vaguely as 'services in Burmah,' and, now retired upon a derelict
country seat in Cornwall, was making a bold push for local importance,
and dividing his leisure between the cultivation of roses (in which he
excelled) and the directorship of a large soap-factory near the Plymouth
docks. Mr. Molesworth did not like him, and might have accounted for his
dislike by a variety of reasons. He himself, for example, grew roses in a
small way as an amateur, and had been used to achieve successes at the
local flower-shows until Sir John arrived and in one season beat him out
of the field. This, as an essentially generous man, he might have
forgiven; but not the loud dogmatic air of patronage with which, on
venturing to congratulate his rival and discuss some question of culture,
he had been bullied and set right, and generally treated as an ignorant
junior. Moreover, he seemed to observe--but he may have been mistaken--
that, whatever rose he selected for his buttonhole, Sir John would take
note of it and trump next day with a finer bloom.

But these were trifles. Putting them aside, Mr. Molesworth felt that he
could never like the man who--to be short--was less of a gentleman than a
h