eed against him, then, Mr. Granger?"

"Proceed, I have proceeded. I've got judgment, and I mean to issue
execution in a few days. I won't stand it any longer," he went on,
working himself up and shaking his head as he spoke till his thin white
hair fell about his eyes. "I will have the law of him and the others
too. You are a lawyer and you can help me. I tell you there's a spirit
abroad which just comes to just--no man isn't to pay his lawful debts,
except of course the parson and the squire. They must pay or go to the
court. But there is law left, and I'll have it, before they play the
Irish game on us here." And he brought down his fist with a bang upon
the table.

Geoffrey listened with some amusement. So this was the weak old man's
sore point--money. He was clearly very strong about that--as strong as
Lady Honoria indeed, but with more excuse. Elizabeth also listened with
evident approval, but Beatrice looked pained.

"Don't get angry, father," she said; "perhaps he will pay after all.
It is bad to take the law if you can manage any other way--it breeds so
much ill blood."

"Nonsense, Beatrice," said her sister sharply. "Father is quite right.
There's only one way to deal with them, and that is to seize their
goods. I believe you are socialist about property, as you are about
everything else. You want to pull everything down, from the Queen to the
laws of marriage, all for the good of humanity, and I tell you that
your ideas will be your ruin. Defy custom and it will crush you. You are
running your head against a brick wall, and one day you will find which
is the harder."

Beatrice flushed, but answered her sister's attack, which was all the
sharper because it had a certain spice of truth in it.

"I never expressed any such views, Elizabeth, so I do not see why you
should attribute them to me. I only said that legal proceedings breed
bad blood in a parish, and that is true."

"I did not say you expressed them," went on the vigorous Elizabeth;
"you look them--they ooze out of your words like water from a peat bog.
Everybody knows you are a radical and a freethinker and everything else
that is bad and mad, and contrary to that state of life in which it has
pleased God to call you. The end of it will be that you will lose the
mistresship of the school--and I think it is very hard on father and me
that you should bring disgrace on us with your strange ways and immoral
views, and now you can make what you like o