s hastily run up for their accommodation. And thus a village
which might be traced in Doomsday Book had been wiped out. For the sick
Tatham had offered a vacant farmhouse as a hospital; and Victoria, Mrs.
Andover, and other ladies had furnished and equipped it. Some twenty
cases of enteric and diphtheria, were housed there, a few of them doomed
beyond hope. Melrose had been peremptorily asked for a subscription to
the fund raised, and had replied in his own handwriting that owing to the
heavy expenses he had been put to by the behaviour of his Mainstairs
tenants, as reported to him by his agent, Mr. Faversham, he must
respectfully decline. The letter was published in the two local papers
with appropriate comments, and a week later an indignation meeting to
protest against the state of the Threlfall property, and to petition the
Local Government Board to hold an inquiry on the spot, was held in
Carlisle, with Tatham in the chair. And everywhere the public indignation
which could not get at Melrose, who now, except for railway journeys,
never showed himself outside the wall of his park, was beginning to fall
upon the "adventurer" who was his tool and accomplice, and had become the
supplanter of his young and helpless daughter. Men who four months before
had been eager to welcome Faversham to his new office now passed him in
the street without recognition. At the County Club to which he had been
easily elected, Colonel Barton proposing him, he was conspicuously cut by
Barton himself, Squire Andover and many others following suit. "An
impostor, and a cad!" said Barton fiercely to Undershaw. "He took me
in--and I can't forgive him. He is doing all Melrose's dirty work for
him, better than Melrose could do it himself. His letters, for instance,
to our Council Committee about the allotments we are trying to get out of
the old villain have been devilish clever, and devilish impudent! Melrose
couldn't have written them. And now this business of the girl!--and the
fortune!--sickening!"

"He is a queer chap," said Undershaw thoughtfully. "I've been as mad with
him as anybody--but somehow--don't know. Suppose we wait a bit. Melrose's
life is a bad one."

But Barton refused to wait, and went off storming.
The facts, he vowed, were more than enough.

The weeks passed on. Duddon knew no longer what Green Cottage was
doing. Victoria, at any rate, was ignorant, and forbore to ask--by
word of mouth; though her thoughts were one long in