gracious permission to remain
in his service. "But if she is, we must find some way of curing her of
that. I don't want a fine lady about _my_ place. There's the dairy, now;
we might do more in that way, I should think, and get more profit out of
butter-making than we do by sending part of the milk up to London. Butter
fetches a good price now-a-days from year's end to year's end, and Ellen
is a rare hand at a dairy; I know that for certain."

Thus did Mr. Whitelaw devote his pretty young wife to an endless prospect
of butter-making. He had no intention that the alliance should be an
unprofitable one, and he was already scheming how he might obtain some
indirect kind of interest for that awful sum of two hundred pounds
advanced to William Carley.

Sir David Forster had not come to make that threatened investigation of
things at the Grange. Careless always in the management of his affairs,
the receipt of a handsome sum of money from the bailiff had satisfied
him, and he had suffered his suspicions to be lulled to rest for the time
being, not caring to undertake the trouble of a journey to Hampshire, and
an examination of dry business details.

It was very lucky for Mr. Carley that his employer was so easy and
indolent a master; for there were many small matters at the Grange which
would have hardly borne inspection, and it would have been difficult for
Sir David to come there without making some discovery to his bailiff's
disadvantage. The evil day had been warded off, however, by means of
Stephen Whitelaw's money, and William Carley meant to act more
cautiously, more honestly even, in future. He would keep clear of
race-courses and gambling booths, he told himself, and of the kind of men
who had beguiled him into dishonourable dealing.

"I have had an uncommon narrow squeak of it," he muttered to himself
occasionally, as he smoked a meditative pipe, "and have been as near
seeing the inside of Portland prison as ever a man was. But it'll be a
warning to me in future. And yet who could have thought that things would
have gone against me as they did? There was Sir Philip Christopher's bay
colt Pigskin, for instance; that brute was bound to win."

February came to an end; and when March once began, there seemed no pause
or breathing-time for Ellen Carley till the 10th. And yet she had little
business to occupy her during those bleak days of early spring. It was
the horror of that rapid flight of time, which seemed indep