such heaps of things, such heaps of people, and
reasons, and--and life; and I know nothing. Dreams are the only times,
it seems to me, that one finds out anything."

"As for that, my child, I am exactly in your case. What's to be done for
us?"

She slid her hand through his arm again.

"Don't laugh at me!"

"Heaven forbid! I meant it. You're finding out much quicker than I. It's
all folk-music to you still; to me Strauss and the rest of the tired
stuff. The variations my mind spins--wouldn't I just swap them for the
tunes your mind is making?"

"I don't seem making tunes at all. I don't seem to have anything to make
them of. Take me down to see 'the Tods,' Dad!"

Why not? And yet--! Just as in this spring night Felix felt so much,
so very much, lying out there behind the still and moony dark, such
marvellous holding of breath and waiting sentiency, so behind
this innocent petition, he could not help the feeling of a lurking
fatefulness. That was absurd. And he said: "If you wish it, by all
means. You'll like your Uncle Tod; as to the others, I can't say,
but your aunt is an experience, and experiences are what you want, it
seems."

Fervently, without speech, Nedda squeezed his arm.

CHAPTER IV

Stanley Freeland's country house, Becket, was almost a show place.
It stood in its park and pastures two miles from the little town of
Transham and the Morton Plough Works; close to the ancestral home of the
Moretons, his mother's family--that home burned down by Roundheads in
the Civil War. The site--certain vagaries in the ground--Mrs. Stanley
had caused to be walled round, and consecrated so to speak with a stone
medallion on which were engraved the aged Moreton arms--arrows and
crescent moons in proper juxtaposition. Peacocks, too--that bird
'parlant,' from the old Moreton crest--were encouraged to dwell there
and utter their cries, as of passionate souls lost in too comfortable
surroundings.

By one of those freaks of which Nature is so prodigal, Stanley--owner of
this native Moreton soil--least of all four Freeland brothers, had the
Moreton cast of mind and body. That was why he made so much more money
than the other three put together, and had been able, with the aid of
Clara's undoubted genius for rank and station, to restore a strain of
Moreton blood to its rightful position among the county families of
Worcestershire. Bluff and without sentiment, he himself set little store
by that, smiling up his sle