er as a landowner. The fact was that the estate
had been for years a mere field for the display of its owner's worst
qualities--caprice, miserliness, jealous or vindictive love of power.
The finance of it mattered nothing to him. Had he been a poorer man his
landed property might have had a chance; he would have been forced to
run it more or less on business lines. But his immense income came to
him apparently from quite other sources--mines, railways, foreign
investments; and with all the human relations involved in landowning he
was totally unfit to deal.

Hence these endless quarrels with his tenants to whom he never allowed a
lease; these constant evictions; these litigations as to improvements,
compensation, and heaven knows what. The land was naturally of excellent
quality, and many a tenant came in with high hopes, only to find that the
promises on the strength of which he had taken his farm were never
fulfilled, and that if it came to lawyers, Melrose generally managed "to
best it." Hence, too, the rotten, insanitary cottages--maintained,
Faversham could almost swear, for the mere sake of defying the local
authorities and teaching "those Socialist fools" a lesson. Hence the
constant charges of persecution for political reasons; and hence, too,
this bad case of the Brands, which had roused such a strong and angry
sympathy in the neighbourhood that Faversham felt the success of his own
regime must be endangered unless some means could be found, compatible
with Melrose's arrogance, of helping the ruined family.

Well, there in those clear typewritten sheets, lay his suggestions for
dealing with these various injustices and infamies. They were moderate.
Expensive for the moment, they would be economical in the long run. He
had given them his best brains and his hardest work. And he had taken the
best advice. But they meant, no doubt, a complete change in the
administration and _personnel_ of the estate.

Faversham stepped into the garden, and, hanging over the low wall which
edged the sandstone cliff, he looked out over the gorge of the river,
across the woods, into the ravines and gullies of the fells. Mountain and
wood stood dark against a saffron sky. In the dim blue above it Venus
sailed. A light wind stirred the trees and the stream. Along the river
meadows he could hear the cows munching and see their dusky forms moving
through a thin mist. The air was amethyst and gold, and the beautiful
earth shone through