the heir at law shrank hopeless into his
little cottage. Now, how changed the pageant!--a farmer's cart, a
splashed and bleeding and senseless form in it, supported by a
childless, despairing woman, one weeping attendant walking at the side,
and, among the gentlemen pacing slowly behind, the heir at law, with
his head lowered in that decent affectation of regret which all heirs
can put on to hide the indecent complacency within.

CHAPTER XV.

AT the steps of Huntercombe Hall the servants streamed out, and
relieved the strangers of the sorrowful load. Sir Charles was carried
into the Hall, and Richard Bassett turned away, with one triumphant
flash of his eye, quickly suppressed, and walked with impenetrable
countenance and studied demeanor into Highmore House.

Even here he did not throw off the mask. It peeled off by degrees. He
began by telling his wife, gravely enough, Sir Charles had met with a
severe fall, and he had attended to him and taken him home.

"Ah, I am glad you did that, Richard," said Mrs. Bassett. "And is he
very badly hurt?"

"I am afraid he will hardly get over it. He never spoke. He just
groaned when they took him down from the cart at Huntercombe."

"Poor Lady Bassett!"

"Ay, it will be a bad job for her. Jane!"

"Yes, dear."

"There is a providence in it. The fall would never have killed him; but
his head struck a tree upon the ground; and that tree was one of the
very elms he had just cut down to rob our boy."

"Indeed?"

"Yes; he was felling the very hedgerow timber, and this was one of the
old elms in a hedge. He must have done it out of spite, for elm-wood
fetches no price; it is good for nothing I know of, except coffins.
Well, he has cut down _his."_

"Poor man! Richard, death reconciles enemies. Surely you can forgive
him now."

"I mean to try."

Richard Bassett seemed now to have imbibed the spirit of quicksilver.
His occupations were not actually enlarged, yet, somehow or other, he
seemed full of business. He was all complacent bustle about nothing. He
left off inveighing against Sir Charles. And, indeed, if you are one of
those weak spirits to whom censure is intolerable, there is a cheap and
easy way to moderate the rancor of detraction--you have only to die.
Let me comfort genius in particular with this little recipe.

Why, on one occasion, Bassett actually snubbed Wheeler for a mere
allusion. That worthy just happened to remark, "No more felling of
timber on