's study the spaniel John, whose head, too,
was long and narrow, had placed it over his paw, as though suffering
from that silence, and when his master cleared his throat he guttered
his tail and turned up an eye with a little moon of white, without
stirring his chin.

The clock ticked at the end of the long, narrow room; the sunlight
through the long, narrow windows fell on the long, narrow backs of books
in the glassed book-case that took up the whole of one wall; and this
room, with its slightly leathery smell, seemed a fitting place for some
long, narrow ideal to be worked out to its long and narrow ending.

But Mr. Pendyce would have scouted the notion of an ending to ideals
having their basis in the hereditary principle.

"Let me do my duty and carry on the estate as my dear old father did,
and hand it down to my son enlarged if possible," was sometimes his
saying, very, very often his thought, not seldom his prayer. "I want to
do no more than that."

The times were bad and dangerous. There was every chance of a Radical
Government being returned, and the country going to the dogs. It was but
natural and human that he should pray for the survival of the form of
things which he believed in and knew, the form of things bequeathed to
him, and embodied in the salutary words "Horace Pendyce." It was not
his habit to welcome new ideas. A new idea invading the country of the
Squire's mind was at once met with a rising of the whole population, and
either prevented from landing, or if already on shore instantly taken
prisoner. In course of time the unhappy creature, causing its squeaks
and groans to penetrate the prison walls, would be released from
sheer humaneness and love of a quiet life, and even allowed certain
privileges, remaining, however, "that poor, queer devil of a foreigner."
One day, in an inattentive moment, the natives would suffer it to marry,
or find that in some disgraceful way it had caused the birth of children
unrecognised by law; and their respect for the accomplished fact, for
something that already lay in the past, would then prevent their trying
to unmarry it, or restoring the children to an unborn state, and very
gradually they would tolerate this intrusive brood. Such was the
process of Mr. Pendyce's mind. Indeed, like the spaniel John, a dog of
conservative instincts, at the approach of any strange thing he placed
himself in the way, barking and showing his teeth; and sometimes truly
he suffe