r to Priesthope. And Wentworth was often
there, for one reason or another. Michael, too, had asked after her, and
had sent her a message by his brother. Should he go over to-day and
deliver it in person? Among his letters was a scrawling, illegible note,
already several days old, from Colonel Bellairs, Fay's father, about the
right of way. The matter, it seemed, was more urgent than Wentworth had
realised. Any matter pertaining to Colonel Bellairs was always, in the
opinion of the latter, of momentous urgency.

Colonel Bellairs asked Wentworth to come over to luncheon the first day
he could, and to walk over the debatable ground with him.

Wentworth looked at his watch, started up and rang the bell, and ordered
his cob Conrad to be brought round at once.

CHAPTER VIII

Le plus grand element des mauvaises actions secretes, des lachetes
inconnues, est peut-etre un honheur incomplet.

--BALZAC.

When Fay, in her panic-stricken widowhood, had fled back to her old home
in Hampshire, she found all very much as she had left it, except that
her father's hair was damply dyed, her sister Magdalen's frankly grey,
and the pigtail of Bessie, the youngest daughter, was now an imposing
bronze coil in the nape of her neck.

But if little else was radically changed in the old home except the hair
of the family, nevertheless, the whole place had somehow declined and
shrunk in Fay's eyes during the three years of her marriage. The dear
old gabled Tudor house, with its twisted chimneys, looked much the same
from the outside, but within, in spite of its wealth of old pictures and
cabinets and china, it had contracted the dim, melancholy aspect which
is the result of prolonged scarcity of money. Nothing had been spent on
the place for years. Magdalen seemed to have faded together with the
curtains, and the darned carpets, and the bleached chintzes.

Colonel Bellairs alone, a handsome man of sixty, had remained remarkably
young for his age. The balance, however, was made even by the fact that
those who lived with him grew old before their time. It had been so
with his wife. It was obviously so with his eldest daughter. Many men as
superficially affectionate as Colonel Bellairs, and at heart as callous,
as exacting and as inconsiderate, have made endurable husbands. But
Colonel Bellairs was not only irresolute and vacillating and incapable
of even the most necessary decisions, but he was an inveterate enemy of
all