hand
violently on the arm of his chair--"and then a dictator--the inevitable
round. Well, I have done my part. I have fought the battle of property in
this country--the battle of every squire in Cumbria, if the dolts did but
know their own interests. Instead they have done nothing but thwart and
bully me for twenty years. And young Tatham with his County Council
nonsense, and his popularity hunting, is one of the very worst of them!
Well, now I've done!--personally. I daresay they'll crow--they'll say I'm
beat. Anyway, I've done. There'll have to be fighting, but some one else
must see to it. I intend to put my affairs into fresh hands. It is my
purpose to appoint a new agent--and to give him complete control of my
property!"

Melrose stopped abruptly. His hard eyes in their deep, round orbits
were fixed on Faversham. The young man was mainly conscious of a
half-hysterical inclination to laugh, which he strangled as he best
could. Was he to be offered the post?

"And, moreover," Melrose resumed, "I want a secretary--I want a
companion--I want some one who will help me to arrange the immense, the
priceless collections there are stacked in this house--unknown to
anybody--hardly known, in the lapse of years, even to myself. I desire to
unravel my own web, so to speak--to spin off my own silk--to examine and
analyze what I have accumulated. There are rooms here--containing
_masterpieces_--unique treasures--that have never been opened for
years--whose contents I have myself forgotten. That's why people call me
a madman. Why? What did I want with a big establishment eating up my
income?--with a lot of prying idiots from outside--museum bores,
bothering me for loans--common tourists, offering impertinent tips to my
housekeeper, or picking and stealing, perhaps, when her back was turned!
I bought the things, and _shut them up_. They were safe, anyway. But now
that process has gone on for a quarter of a century. You come along. A
chance--a freak--a caprice, if you like, makes me arrange these rooms for
you. That gives me new ideas--"

He turned and looked with sharp, slow scrutiny round the walls:

"The fact is I have been so far engaged in hoarding--heaping together.
The things in this house--my extraordinary collections--have been the
nuts--and I, the squirrel. But now the nuts are bursting out of the hole,
and the squirrel wants to see what he's got. That brings me to my point!"

He turned emphatically toward Faversham,