ab.

"Littimer or perdition!" he said. "You don't want to go to the latter
just yet? Jump in, then!"

CHAPTER XXV

LITTIMER CASTLE

If you had asked the first five people on the Littimer Estate what they
thought of the lord of the soil you would have had a different answer
from every one. One woman would have said that a kinder and better man
never lived; her neighbour would have declared Lord Littimer to be as
hard as the nether millstone. Farmer George would rate him a jolly good
fellow, and tell how he would sit in the kitchen over a mug of ale;
whilst Farmer John swore at his landlord as a hard-fisted, grasping miser
devoid of the bowels of compassion.

At the end of an hour you would be utterly bewildered, not knowing what
to believe, and prepared to set the whole village down as a lot of
gossips who seemed to mind everything but its own business. And,
perhaps, Lord Littimer might come riding through on his big black horse,
small, lithe, brown as mahogany, and with an eye piercing as a
diamond-drill. One day he looked almost boyishly young, there would be a
smile on his tanned face. And then another day he would be bent in the
saddle, huddled up, wizened, an old, old man, crushed with the weight of
years and sorrow.

In sooth he was a man of moods and contradictions, changeable as an April
sky, and none the less quick-tempered and hard because he knew that
everybody was terribly afraid of him. And he had a tongue, too, a
lashing, cutting tongue that burnt and blistered. Sometimes he would be
quite meek and angry under the reproaches of the vicar, and yet the same
day history records it that he got off his horse and administered a sound
thrashing to the village poacher. Sometimes he got the best of the vicar,
and sometimes that worthy man scored. They were good friends, these two,
though the vicar never swerved in his fealty to Lady Littimer, whose
cause he always championed. But nobody seemed to know anything about that
dark scandal. They knew that there had been a dreadful scene at the
castle seven years before, and that Lady Littimer and her son had left
never to return. Lady Littimer was in a madhouse somewhere, they said,
and the son was a wanderer on the face of the earth. And when Lord
Littimer died every penny of the property, the castle included, would go
to her ladyship's nephew, Mr. Reginald Henson.

In spite of the great cloud that hung over the family Lord Littimer did
not seem to have