ell the cat. We want a hundred acres of the
Park, a new agent, notices for three farmers, etcetera!'

The Rector whistled. 'I shall wait, on tiptoe, to see what happens!
What are your powers?'

'Oh, tremendous!'

'So you have him? Well, good-day.'

And the Rector was passing on. But Sir Henry stooped over his
horse's neck--'As you know, perhaps, it would be very inconvenient
to my poor little Beryl if Mannering were to make a quarrel of it
with me.'

'Ah, I gathered that she and Aubrey were engaged,' said the Rector
cordially. 'Best congratulations! Has the Squire behaved well?'

'Moderately. He declares he has no money to give them.'

'And yet he spent eighteen hundred pounds last week at that Christie
sale!' said the Rector with a laugh. 'And now I suppose the new
secretary will add fuel to the flame. I saw Pamela for a minute
alone, and she said Miss Bremerton was "just as much gone on Greek
things as father," and they were like a pair of lunatics when the
new vases came down.'

'Oh, blow the secretary!' said Sir Henry with exasperation. 'And
meanwhile his daughters can't get a penny out of him for any war
purpose whatever! Well, I must go on.'

They parted, and Sir Henry put his cob into a sharp trot which
soon brought him in sight of a distant building--low and
irregular--surrounded by trees, and by the wide undulating slopes
of the park.

'Dreadfully ugly place,' he said to himself, as the house grew
plainer; 'rebuilt at the worst time, by a man with no more taste
than a broomstick. Still, he was the sixteenth owner, from father to
son. That's something.'

And he fell to thinking, with that half-ironic depreciation which he
allowed to himself, and would have stood from no one else, of his
own brand-new Georgian house, built from the plans of a famous
American architect, ten years before the war, out of the profits of
an abnormally successful year, and furnished in what he believed to
be faultless taste by the best professional decorator he could find.

'Yet compared to a Mannering, what do I mean to the people here?
You scarcely begin to take root in this blessed country under half a
century. Mannering is exceedingly unpopular; the people think him a
selfish idler; but if he chose he could whistle them back with a
hundredth part of the trouble it would take me! And if Aubrey wanted
to go into Parliament, he'd probably have his pick of the county
divisions. Curious fellow, Aubrey! I wonder exactly