is did not happen. A change, more comprehensive than at first
appeared, had taken place, and a singular alteration was gradually
established.

He grew thin, his eyes hollow, his face gradually forbidding.

His ways and temper were changed: he was a new man with Sir Bale; and
the Baronet after a time, people said, began to grow afraid of him. And
certainly Feltram had acquired an extraordinary influence over the
Baronet, who a little while ago had regarded and treated him with so
much contempt.

CHAPTER XV

The Purse of Gold

The Baronet was very slightly known in his county. He had led a reserved
and inhospitable life. He was pressed upon by heavy debts; and being a
proud man, held aloof from society and its doings. He wished people to
understand that he was nursing his estate; but somehow the estate did
not thrive at nurse. In the country other people's business is admirably
well known; and the lord of Mardykes was conscious, perhaps, that his
neighbours knew as well he did, that the utmost he could do was to pay
the interest charged upon it, and to live in a frugal way enough.

The lake measures some four or five miles across, from the little jetty
under the walls of Mardykes Hall to Cloostedd.

Philip Feltram, changed and morose, loved a solitary row upon the lake;
and sometimes, with no one to aid him in its management, would take the
little sailboat and pass the whole day upon those lonely waters.

Frequently he crossed to Cloostedd; and mooring the boat under the
solemn trees that stand reflected in that dark mirror, he would
disembark and wander among the lonely woodlands, as people thought,
cherishing in those ancestral scenes the memory of ineffaceable
injuries, and the wrath and revenge that seemed of late to darken his
countenance, and to hold him always in a moody silence.

One autumnal evening Sir Bale Mardykes was sourly ruminating after his
solitary meal. A very red sun was pouring its last low beams through the
valley at the western extremity of the lake, across its elsewhere sombre
waters, and touching with a sudden and blood-red tint the sail of the
skiff in which Feltram was returning from his lonely cruise.

"Here comes my domestic water-fiend," sneered Sir Bale, as he lay back
in his cumbrous arm-chair. "Cheerful place, pleasant people, delicious
fate! The place alone has been enough to set that fool out of his little
senses, d--n him!"

Sir Bale averted his eyes, and another su