f mother and son, and young Lord
Tatham, curly-haired, good-humoured, and good-hearted, became
thenceforward the favourite and princeling of the countryside. On the
east and north, the Duddon estates marched with Melrose's property.
Occasions of friction constantly arose, but the determination on each
side to have no more communication with the other than was absolutely
necessary generally composed any nascent dispute; so long at least as
Lady Tatham and a very diplomatic agent were in charge.

But at the age of twenty-four, Harry Tatham succeeded to the sole
management of his estates, and his mother soon realized that her son was
not likely to treat their miserly neighbour with the same patience as
herself.

And with the changes in human life, went changes even more subtle and
enduring in the Cumbria county itself. Those were times of crisis for
English agriculture. Wheat-lands went back to pasture; and a surplus
population, that has found its way for generations to the factory towns,
began now to turn toward the great Canadian spaces beyond the western
sea. Only the mountains still rose changeless and eternal, at least to
human sense; "ambitious for the hallowing" of moon and sun; keeping their
old secrets, and their perpetual youth.

And after twenty years Threlfall Tower became the scene of another drama,
whereof what has been told so far is but the prologue.

III

It was a May evening, and Lydia Penfold, spinster, aged twenty-four, was
sketching in St. John's Vale, that winding valley which, diverging from
the Ambleside-Keswick road in an easterly direction, divides the northern
slopes of the Helvellyn range from the splendid mass of Blencathra.

So beautiful was the evening, so ravishing under its sway were heaven and
earth, that Lydia's work went but slowly. She was a professional artist,
to whom guineas were just as welcome as to other people; and she had very
industrious and methodical views of her business. But she was, before
everything, one of those persons who thrill under the appeal of beauty to
a degree that often threatens or suspends practical energy. Save for the
conscience in her, she could have lived from day to day just for the
moments of delight, the changes in light and shade, in colour and form,
that this beautiful world continually presents to senses as keen as hers.
Lydia's conscience, however, was strong; though on this particular
evening it did little or nothing to check the she