ere stood a "coal lodge" suited to the
size of the domicile and already stacked with a full winter's supply
of coal. Therefore the well-polished and cleanly little grate in the
living-room was bright with fire.

Old Doby, who had tottered round the corner to pay his fellow gossip a
visit, was sitting by it, and old Mrs. Welden, clean as to cap and apron
and small purple shoulder shawl, had evidently been allaying his natural
anxiety as to the conduct of foreign sovereigns by reading in a loud
voice the "print" under the pictures in an illustrated paper.

This occupation had, however, been interrupted a few moments before Miss
Vanderpoel's arrival. Mrs. Bester, the neighbour in the next
cottage, had stepped in with her youngest on her hip and was talking
breathlessly. She paused to drop her curtsy as Betty entered, and old
Doby stood up and made his salute with a trembling hand,

"She'll know," he said. "Gentry knows the ins an' outs of gentry fust.
She'll know the rights."

"What has happened?"

Mrs. Bester unexpectedly burst into tears. There was an element in
the female villagers' temperament which Betty had found was frequently
unexpected in its breaking forth.

"He's down, miss," she said. "He's down with it crool bad. There'll be
no savin' of him--none."

Betty laid her package of sewing cotton and knitting wool quietly on the
blue and white checked tablecloth.

"Who--is he?" she asked.

"His lordship--and him just saved all Dunstan parish from death--to go
like this!"

In Stornham village and in all others of the neighbourhood the feminine
attitude towards Mount Dunstan had been one of strongly emotional
admiration. The thwarted female longing for romance--the desire for
drama and a hero had been fed by him. A fine, big young man, one that
had been "spoke ill of" and regarded as an outcast, had suddenly turned
the tables on fortune and made himself the central figure of the county,
the talk of gentry in their grand houses, of cottage women on their
doorsteps, and labourers stopping to speak to each other by the
roadside. Magic stories had been told of him, beflowered with dramatic
detail. No incident could have been related to his credit which would
not have been believed and improved upon. Shut up in his village working
among his people and unseen by outsiders, he had become a popular idol.
Any scrap of news of him--any rumour, true or untrue, was seized upon
and excitedly spread abroad. Therefore Mr