it with
disgust. He knew well that the great mass of it was perjured stuff,
bought at a high price. Yet both in public and private he would have to
back up all the lies and evasions that his master, and the pack of
obscure hangers-on who lived upon his pay, chose to put forward.

He set his teeth as he read. The iron of his servitude was cutting its
way into life, deeper and deeper. Could he go on bearing it? For weeks he
had lived with Melrose on terms of sheer humiliation--rated, or mocked
at, his advice spurned, the wretched Nash and his crew ostentatiously
preferred to him, even put over him. "No one shall ever say I haven't
earned my money," he would say to himself fiercely, as the intolerable
days went by. His only abiding hope and compensation lay in his intense
belief that Melrose was a dying man. All those feelings of natural
gratitude, with which six months before he had entered on his task,
were long since rooted up. He hated his tyrant, and he wished him dead.
But the more he dwelt for consolation on the prospect of Melrose's
disappearance, the more attractive became to him the vision of his own
coming reign. Some day he would be his own master, and the master of
these hoards. Some day he would emerge from the cloud of hatred and
suspicion in which he habitually walked; some day he would be able once
more to follow the instincts of an honest man; some day he would be able
again--perhaps--to look Lydia Penfold in the face! Endurance for a few
more months, on the best terms he could secure, lest the old madman
should even yet revoke his gifts; and then--a transformation scene--on
the details of which his thoughts dwelt perpetually, by way of relief
from the present. Tatham and the rest of his enemies, who were now
hunting and reviling him, would be made to understand that if he had
stooped, he had stooped with a purpose; and that the end _did_ in this
case justify the means.

A countryside cleansed, comforted, remade; a great estate ideally
managed; a great power to be greatly used; scope for experiment, for
public service, for self-realization--he greedily, passionately, foresaw
them all. Let him be patient. Nothing could interfere with his dream,
but some foolish refusal of the conditions on which alone it could come
true.

Often, when this mood of self-assertion was on him, he would go back in
thought to his boyish holidays in Oxford, and to his uncle. He saw the
kind old fellow in his shepherd plaid sui