. Avoid quarrels and seek a
reconciliation--that is my plan. Best way is to ask the other chap to
dinner and do him well. What are you going home for now? It is too
late."

As, indeed, I knew without the telling. For when I reached Hopton my
father had already been laid in the old churchyard beneath the shadow
of the crumbling walls of the ruined church, which is now no longer
used. They have built a gaudy new edifice farther inland, but so long
as a Howard owns Hopton Hall, we shall, I think, continue to lie in
the graveyard nearer to the sea.

I suppose we are a quarrelsome race, for I fell foul of several
persons almost as soon as I arrived. The lawyers vowed that there were
difficulties--but none, I protest, but what such parchment minds as
theirs would pause to heed. One thing, however, was certain. Did I not
read it in black and white myself? My obstinate old father--and, by
gad! I respect him for it--had held to his purpose. He had left me
penniless unless I consented to marry Isabella Gayerson. The estate
was bequeathed in trust, to be administered by said trustees during my
lifetime, unless I acceded to a certain matrimonial arrangement
entertained for me. Those were the exact words. So Isabella had no
cause to blush when the will was published abroad. And we may be sure
that the whole county knew it soon enough, and vowed that they had
always thought so.

"If one may inquire the nature of the matrimonial arrangement so
vaguely specified?"... said the respectable Norwich solicitor who,
like all his kind, had a better coat than his client, for those who
live on the vanity and greed of their neighbours live well.

"One may," I replied, "and one may go to the devil and ask him."

The lawyer gave a dry laugh as he turned over his papers, and I make
no doubt charged some one for his wounded feelings.

So the secret was kept between me and the newly raised stone in Hopton
churchyard. And I felt somehow that there was a link between us in the
fact that my father had kept the matter of our quarrel from the mouths
of gossips and tattlers, leaving it to my honour to obey or disobey
him, and abide by the result.

I am not one of those who think it right to remember their dead as
saints who lived a blameless life, and passed away from a world that
was not good enough for them. Is it not wiser to remember them as they
were, men and women like ourselves, with faults in number, and a
half-developed virtue or two, pos