nd went back to
the old shops in the village.

All sorts of improvements had Lionel begun. That is, he had planned
them: begun yet, they were not. Building better tenements for the
labourers, repairing and draining the old ones, adding whatever might be
wanted to make the dwellings healthy: draining, ditching, hedging. "It
shall not be said that while I live in a palace, my poor live in
pigsties," said Lionel to Mr. Bitterworth one day. "I'll do what I can
to drive that periodical ague from the place."

"Have you counted the cost?" was Mr. Bitterworth's rejoinder.

"No," said Lionel. "I don't intend to count it. Whatever the changes may
cost, I shall carry them out."

And Lionel, like other new schemers, was red-hot upon them. He drew out
plans in his head and with his pencil; he consulted architects, he
spent half his days with builders. Lionel was astonished at the mean,
petty acts of past tyranny, exercised by Roy, which came to light, far
more than he had had any idea of. He blushed for himself and for his
uncle, that such a state of things had been allowed to go on; he
wondered that it could have gone on; that he had been blind to so much
of it, or that the men had not exercised Lynch law upon Roy.

Roy had taken his place in the brick-yard as workman; but Lionel, in the
anger of the moment, when these things came out, felt inclined to spurn
him from the land. He would have done it but for his promise to the man
himself; and for the pale, sad face of Mrs. Roy. In the hour when his
anger was at its height, the woman came up to Verner's Pride,
stealthily, as it seemed, and craved him to write to Australia, "now he
was a grand gentleman," and ask the "folks over there" if they could
send back news of her son. "It's going on of a twelvemonth since he
writed to us, sir, and we don't know where to write to him, and I'm
a'most fretted into my grave."

"My opinion is that he is coming home," said Lionel.

"Heaven sink the ship first!" she involuntarily muttered, and then she
burst into a violent flood of tears.

"What do you mean?" exclaimed Lionel. "Don't you want him to come home?"

"No, sir. No."

"But why? Are you fearing"--he jumped to the most probable solution of
her words that he could suggest--"are you fearing that he and Roy would
not agree?--that there would be unpleasant scenes between them, as there
used to be?"

The woman had her face buried in her hands, and she never lifted it as
she answered,