nd, Meyrick
arrived for his morning round, much preoccupied. He hurried his work a
little, and after it was done asked Robert to walk up the road with him.

'I have seen the Squire, sir,' he said, turning on his companion with a
certain excitement.

Robert flushed.

'Have you?' he replied with his hands behind him, and a world of
expression in his sarcastic voice.

'You misjudge him! You misjudge him, Mr. Elsmere!' the old man said
tremulously. 'I told you he could know of this business--and he didn't!
He has been in town part of the time, and down here, how is he to know
anything? He sees nobody. That man Henslowe, sir, must be a real _bad_
fellow.'

'Don't abuse the man,' said Robert, looking up. 'It's not worth while,
when you can say your mind of the master.'

Old Meyrick sighed.

'Well,' said Robert, after a moment, his lip drawn and quivering, 'you
told him the story, I suppose? Seven deaths, is it, by now? Well,
what sort of impression did these unfortunate accidents'--and he
smiled--'produce?'

'He talked of sending money,' said Meyrick doubtfully; he said he would
have Henslowe up and inquire. He seemed put about and annoyed. Oh, Mr.
Elsmere, you think too hardly of the Squire, that you do!'

They strolled on together in silence. Robert was not inclined to discuss
the matter. But old Meyrick seemed to be laboring under some suppressed
emotion, and presently he began upon his own experiences as a doctor of
the Wendover family. He had already broached the subject more or
less vaguely with Robert. Now, however, he threw his medical reserve,
generally his strongest characteristic, to the winds. He insisted on
telling his companion, who listened reluctantly, the whole miserable
and ghastly story of the old Squire's suicide. He described the heir's
summons, his arrival just in time for the last scene with all its
horrors, and that mysterious condition of the Squire for some months
afterward, when no one, not even Mrs. Darcy, had been admitted to the
Hall, and old Meyrick, directed at intervals by a great London doctor,
had been the only spectator of Roger Wendover's physical and mental
breakdown, the only witness of that dark consciousness of inherited
fatality which at that period of his life not even the Squire's iron
will had been able wholly to conceal.

Robert, whose attention was inevitably roused after a while, found
himself with some curiosity realizing the Squire from another man's
totally diff