the County Committee, and
that it would please a good many people to see all his woods
commandeered and 'cut clean.'

Six months before, his inborn pugnacity would only have amused
itself with the situation. He was a rebel and a litigant by nature.
Smooth waters had never attracted him.

Yet now--though he would never have admitted it--he was often
conscious of a flagging will and a depressed spirit. The loneliness
of his life, due entirely to himself, had, during Elizabeth
Bremerton's absence, begun sharply to find him out. He had no true
fatherly relation with any of his children. Desmond loved him--why,
he didn't know. He didn't believe any of the others cared anything
at all about him. Why should they?

The Squire's eyes followed the three distant walkers, Elizabeth,
graceful and vigorous, between the other two. And the conviction
gripped him that all the pleasure, the _liveableness_ of life--such
as still remained possible--depended for him on that central figure.
He looked back on his existence before her arrival at Mannering, and
on what it had been since. Why, she had transformed it!

How could he cage and keep her?--the clever, gracious creature! For
the first time in his life he was desperately, tremulously humble.
He placed no dependence at all on his name or his possessions.
Elizabeth was not to be bought.

But management--power--for the things she believed in--_they_ might
tempt her. He would give them to her with both hands, if only she
would settle down beside him, take a freehold of that chair and
table in the library, for life!

He looked back gloomily to his clumsy proposal about her mother, and
to her remarks about Pamela. It would be indeed intolerable if his
children got in his way! The very notion put him in a fever.

If that tiresome fellow, Dell, had not interrupted them the night
before, what would have happened?

He had all the consciousness of a man still in the prime of life, in
spite of his white hair; for he had married at twenty-one, and had
never--since they grew up--seemed to himself very much older than
his elder children. He had but a very dim memory of his wife.
Sometimes he felt as if, notwithstanding the heat of boyish passion
which had led him to marry her, he had never really known her. There
were moments when he had an uncomfortable suspicion that for some
years before her death she had silently but irrevocably passed
judgment upon him, and had withdrawn her inner life