"Yes, nothing but catalogues and bills; you'd better take them, Ida;
the bills, at any rate."

And he threw them across to her.

When she had first come home to be mistress of the Hall the bills had
overwhelmed her; they had been so many and the money to meet them had
been so inadequate; but she had soon learnt how to "finance" them, and
come to know which account must be paid at once, and which might be
allowed to stand over.

She took them now and glanced at them, and the old man watched her
covertly, with a curious expression on his face.

"I'm sure I don't know how you will pay them," he said, as if she alone
were responsible.

"I can't pay all of them at once," she replied, cheerfully. "But I can
some, and the rest must wait. I can send four--perhaps five--of the
steers to the monthly market, and then there are the sheep--Oh, father,
I did not tell; you about the gentleman I saw fishing in the dale--"

She stopped, for she saw that he was not listening. He had opened a
local paper and was reading it intently, and presently he looked up
with an eager flush on his face and a sudden lightening of the dull
eyes.

"Have you seen this--this house--they call it a palace--which that man
has built on the lake side?" he asked, his thin voice quavering with
resentment.

"Do you mean the big white house by Brae Wood?"

"Yes. Judging by the description of it here, it must be a kind of
gim-crack villa like those one sees in Italy, built by men resembling
this--this _parvenu_."

"It is a large place," said Ida; "but I don't think it is gim-crack,
father. It looks very solid though it is white and, yes, Continental.
It is something between a tremendous villa and a palace. Why are you so
angry? I know you don't like to have new houses built in Bryndermere;
but this is some distance from us--we cannot see it from here, or from
any part of the grounds, excepting the piece by the lake."

"It is built on our land," he said, more quietly, but with the flush
still on his face, the angry light in his eyes. "It was bought by
fraud, obtained under false pretences. I sold it to one of the farmers,
thinking he wanted it and would only use it for grazing. I did not know
until the deeds were signed that he was only the jackal for this other
man."

"What other man, father?"

"This Stephen Orme. He's _Sir_ Stephen Orme now. They knighted him.
They knight every successful tradesman and schemer; and this man is a
prince of his tri