indifferent talk on
local matters with Mr. Bickerton. Inwardly he was asking himself whether
he could ever sit at the Squire's table and eat his bread again. It
seemed to him that they had had a brush which would be difficult to
forget. And as he sat there before the Squire's wine, hot with righteous
heat, all his grievances against the man and the landlord crowded
upon him. A fig for intellectual eminence if it make a man oppress his
inferiors and bully his equals!

But as the minutes passed on, the Rector had cooled down. The sweet,
placable, scrupulous nature began to blame itself. 'What, play your
cards so badly, give up the game so rashly, the very first round?
Nonsense! Patience and try again. There must be some cause in the
background. No need to be white-livered, but every need, in the case of
such a man as the Squire, to take no hasty, needless offence.'

So he had cooled and cooled, and now here were Meyrick and he close to
the Squire and his companion. The two men, as the Rector approached,
were discussing some cases of common enclosure that had just taken
place in the neighborhood. Robert listened a moment, then struck in.
Presently, when the chat dropped, he began to express to the Squire his
pleasure in the use of the library. His manner was excellent, courtesy
itself, but without any trace of effusion.

'I believe,' he said at last, smiling, 'my father used to be allowed the
same privileges. If so, it quite accounts for the way in which he clung
to Murewell.'

'I had never the honor of Mr. Edward Elsmere's acquaintance,' said the
Squire frigidly. 'During the time of his occupation of the Rectory I was
not in England.'

'I know. Do you still go much to Germany? Do you keep up your relations
with Berlin?'

'I have not seen Berlin for fifteen years,' said the Squire briefly, his
eyes in their wrinkled sockets fixed sharply on the man who ventured to
question him about himself, uninvited. There was an awkward pause. Then
the Squire turned again to Mr. Bickerton.

'Bickerton, have you noticed how many trees that storm of last February
has brought down at the northeast corner of the park?'

Robert was inexpressibly galled by the movement, by the words
themselves. The Squire had not yet addressed a single remark of any
kind about Murewell to him. There was a deliberate intention to exclude
implied in this appeal to the man who was not the man of the place, on
such a local point, which struck Robert ve