y a
suspicion. Here at Steens the days passed quietly, the servants obeying
him as though he had been master for years. They brought him no gossip,
and any rumours Malachi picked up Malachi kept to himself. Roger, never a
man to talk with servants, brooded rather on the attempted wrong. That in
itself was enough to sour a man. He had met it with prompt action and
baulked it, but he nursed a sense of injury. He felt especially bitter
towards Mr. Jose, first of all for permitting such a will to be made
without discovering it, and next for shilly-shallying over the decisive
counter-stroke. To possible trouble ahead he gave no thought.

The days drew on to hay-harvest, and on the 5th of June Roger and his men
started to mow Behan Parc, a wide meadow to the east of the house.
Roger took a scythe himself: he enjoyed mowing.

By noon the field was half-shorn, and the master, pausing to whet his
scythe, had begun to think upon dinner, when at a call from Malachi he
looked up to see a ragged wastrel of a man picking his way across the
swathes towards him with a paper in his hand.

"Hullo! What's this?" he demanded, taking the paper and unfolding it.

As his eye took in its contents the blood surged up and about his temples.
He tore the paper across and across again, flung the pieces on the ground,
and stooped for his scythe.

The wastrel cast a wild look about him and fled. As he turned, presenting
his back, Roger hurled his hone. It caught him a little above the
shoulder-blades, almost on the neck, and broke in two pieces. The unhappy
man pitched forward on his face.

Some of the mowers ran to pick him up. "Thee'st killed him, master,
for sure!" cried one.

"Ch't!" snarled Roger, and strode back to the house without another look.

The law was in motion, then, and in motion to oust him! He could scarcely
believe it; indeed, it was scarcely thinkable. But over his first blind,
incredulous rage there swept a passionate longing to be alone in the house
--to sit in it and look about him and assure himself. Without thought of
what he did, he touched the door-jamb reverently as he stepped across the
threshold. He wandered from room to room, and even upstairs, feeling the
groove in the oaken stair-rail familiar under his palm. Yes, it was his,
this home of dead and gone Stephens; it was here, and he was its master.
And of this they would dare to deprive him--they, an interloping trollop
and a dirty little attor