about him. He did not belong to
any particular family of Mackenzies. He was the son of a Scots peasant,
and was said to have tramped to London at the age of sixteen, and to
have taken forcible shipment as a stowaway in the Black-Lyell Arctic
Expedition; and afterwards to have climbed to the leadership of
expeditions of his own with incredible rapidity. He had never made any
secret of his lowly origin, and was even said to be proud of it. The
Squire approved heartily of this.

It was also characteristic of the Squire that a man who had done big
things and got himself talked about should be accepted frankly as an
equal, and, outside the sphere of clanship, even as a superior. A great
musician would have been treated in the same way, or a great painter, or
even a great scholar. For the Squire belonged to the class of all others
the most prejudiced and at the same time the most easily led, when its
slow-moving imagination is once touched--a class which believes itself
divinely appointed to rule, but will give political adherence and almost
passionate personal loyalty to men whom in the type it most dislikes,
its members following one another like sheep when their first
instinctive mistrust has been overcome. Mackenzie was one of the most
talked of men in England at this moment. It was a matter of
congratulation that Jim had caught him for a two-days' visit, though
Jim's catch had involved no more skill than was needed to answer an
unexpected note from Mackenzie announcing his arrival on Friday
afternoon. The Clintons had dined at Mountfield on Friday night, the
Grahams and Mackenzie had dined at Kencote on Saturday, and it had been
arranged that Jim and his guest should drive over this afternoon and
stay to dine again.

When luncheon was over the Squire retired into the library with the
_Spectator_, which it was known he would not read, Dick went into the
smoking-room, Mrs. Clinton and Miss Bird upstairs, and the twins
straight into the garden, where Cicely presently followed them with a
book. She settled herself in a basket chair under a great lime tree on
the lawn, and leaving her book lying unopened on her lap, gave herself
over to further reverie.

Perhaps the sudden descent of this man from a strange world into the
placid waters of her life had something to do with the surging up of her
discontent, for she had not been so discontented since the Birkets'
visit two months before, having followed out to some extent he