ts scanty furniture piled in another. The
candle held by Mrs. Dixon lit up the richly decorated ceiling.

"Can't you do anything better?" asked Undershaw, turning upon her
vehemently. "Don't you keep a spare bedroom in this place?"

"Noa, we doan't!" said Mrs. Dixon, with answering temper. "There isn't a
room upstairs but what's full o' Muster Melrose's things. Yo' mun do wi'
this, or naethin'."

Undershaw submitted, and Faversham's bearers gently laid him down,
spreading their coats on the bare floor to receive him, till a bed could
be found. Dixon and his wife, in a state of pitiable disturbance, went
off to look for one, while Undershaw called after them:

"And I warn you that to-morrow you'll have to find quarters for two
nurses!"

Thus, without any conscious action on his own part, and in the absence of
its formidable master, was Claude Faversham brought under the roof of
Threlfall Tower.

IV

On the evening of the following day, Mr. Edmund Melrose arrived in
Pengarth by train from London, hired a one-horse wagonette, and drove out
to the Tower.

His manners were at no time amiable, but the man who had the honour of
driving him on this occasion, and had driven him occasionally before, had
never yet seen him in quite so odious a temper. This was already evident
at the time of the start from Pengarth, and thenceforward the cautious
Cumbrian preserved an absolute and watchful silence, to the great
annoyance of Melrose, who would have welcomed any excuse for ill-humour.
But as nothing beyond the curtest monosyllables were to be got out of his
companion, and as the rich beauty of the May landscape was entirely lost
upon himself, Melrose was reduced at last in the course of his ten miles'
drive to scanning once more the copy of the _Times_ which he had brought
with him from the south. The news of various strikes and industrial
arbitrations which it contained had already enraged him; and enraged him
again as he looked through it. The proletariat, in his opinion, must be
put down and kept down; that his own class began to show a lamentable
want of power to do either was the only public matter that ever really
troubled him. So far as his life was affected by the outside world at
all, except as a place where auctions took place, and dealers' shops
abounded, it was through this consciousness of impending social disaster,
this terror as of a rapidly approaching darkness bearing the doom of the
modern world in