; it lent a little more point
to the innuendo on every tongue, the intelligence in every eye. He was
sick with disgust, and consumed with the desire to get out of it all, to
cut Drayton Parva for good. The accursed place was trying to stare him
out of countenance. Everywhere he turned there was a stare: it was on the
villagers' faces, behind Miss Batchelor's eye-glass, on the bare fields
with their sunken fences, and on that abominable bald-faced house of his.

No doubt this was the secret of the business that took Tyson up to town
so many times that winter. He said nothing to his wife that could account
for his frequent absence, but she believed that he was looking about for
the long-promised flat; and when he remarked casually one morning that he
meant to leave Thorneytoft in the spring she was not surprised. Neither
was Mrs. Wilcox. The flat had appeared rather often in her conversation
of late. Mrs. Wilcox was dimly, fitfully aware of the state of public
opinion; but it did not disturb her in the least. She at once assumed
the smile and the attitude of Hope; she smiled on her son-in-law's
aberrations as she smiled on the ways of the universe at large, and for
the same reason, that the one was about as intelligible as the other. She
went about paying visits, and in the course of conversation gave people
to understand that Mr. Tyson's residence in Drayton had been something of
a concession on his part from the first. So large a land-owner had a
great many tiresome claims and obligations, as well as a position to keep
up in his county; but there could be no doubt that Nevill was quite lost
in the place, and that the true sphere of his activity was town. Mrs.
Wilcox's taste for vague and ample phrases was extremely convenient at
times.

If his wife was the last person to be consulted in Tyson's arrangements,
it may be supposed that no great thought was taken for his son and heir.
Not that the little creature would have been much affected by any change
in his surroundings; he was too profoundly indifferent to the world. It
had taken all the delicious tumult of the spring, all the flaming show of
summer, to move him to a few pitiful smiles. He had none of the healthy
infant's passion and lusty grasp of life; he seemed to touch it as he had
touched his mother's breasts, delicately, tentatively, with some foregone
fastidious sense of its illusion. What little interest he had ever taken
in the thing declined perceptibly with