th
sent for, and the old flitch all cut to waste. Do'e go and look at the
flitches, sir, and the hams. They're in the room over the stables. And
it's always butter, butter, butter, in the kitchen! Not a bit o'
dripping used! There's not a pot of dripping in the larder, or so much
as a skin of lard. Where does it all go to? You ask Mrs. Smith; and how
she sleeps in her bed at night I don't know!"

Dare listened, nodded, made his escape, and did nothing. In the village
it was as bad. Time, which had dealt so kindly with Vandon itself, had
taken the straggling village in hand too. Nothing could be more
picturesque than the crazy black-and-white houses, with lichen on their
broken-in thatch, and the plaster peeling off from between the irregular
beams of black wood; nothing more picturesque--and nothing more
miserable.

When Time puts in his burnt umbers and brown madders with a lavish hand,
and introduces his beautiful irregularities of outline, and his artistic
disrepair, he does not look to the drainage, and takes no thought for
holes in the roof.

Dare could not go out without eager women sallying out of cottages as he
passed, begging him just to come in and walk up-stairs. They would say
no more--but would the new squire walk up-stairs? And Dare would stumble
up and see enough to promise. Alas! how much he promised in those early
days. And in the gloaming, heavy dull-eyed men met him in the lanes
coming back from their work, and followed him to "beg pardon, sir," and
lay before the new squire things that would never reach him through
Waters--bitter things, small injustices, too trivial to seem worthy of
mention, which serve to widen the gulf between class and class. They
looked to Dare to help them, to make the crooked straight, to begin a
new regime. They looked to the new king to administer his little realm;
the new king, who, alas! cared for none of these things. And Dare
promised that he would do what he could, and looked anxious and
interested, and held out his brown hand, and raised hopes. But he had no
money--no money.

He spoke to Waters at first; but he soon found that it was no good. The
houses were bad? Of course they were bad. Cottage property did not pay;
and would Mr. Dare kindly tell him where the money for repairing them
was to come from? Perhaps Mr. Dare might like to put a little of his
private fortune into the cottages and the drains and the new pumps? Dare
winced. His fortune had not gone the t