ths ago that he
and Ryley stood level in the hazard of gaining the inheritance, but the
history of the legacy, revealed after the funeral, aroused his disgusted
imagination, as it had not been roused before.

He was beaten; and, more important, he knew it now; he had the incensed,
futile, malevolent, devil-may-care feeling of being beaten. He bitterly
invited Fate not to stop at half-measures but to come on and do her
worst. And Fate, with that mysterious responsiveness which often
distinguishes her movements, came on. 'Of course! I might have expected
it!' John exclaimed savagely, two days later, when he received a
circular to the effect that a small and desperate minority of
shareholders were trying to put the famous brewery company into
liquidation under the supervision of the Court. The shares fell another
five in twenty-four hours. The Bursley Conservative Club knew positively
the same night that John had 'got out' at a ruinous loss, and this
episode seemed to give vigorous life to certain rumours, hitherto faint,
that John and his uncle had violently quarrelled at his aunt's funeral,
and that when Meshach died Fred Ryley would be found to be the heir.
Other rumours, that Ethel Stanway and Fred Ryley were about to be
secretly married, that Dain would have been the owner of Prince but for
the difference between guineas and pounds, and that the real object of
Arthur Twemlow's presence in the Five Towns was to buy up the concern of
Twemlow & Stanway, were received with reserve, though not entirely
discredited. The town, however, was more titillated than perturbed, for
every one said that old Meshach, for the sake of the family's good name,
would never under any circumstances permit a catastrophe to occur. The
town saw little of Meshach now--he had almost ceased to figure in the
streets; it knew, however, the Myatt pride in the Myatt respectability.

* * * * *

Leonora sympathised with John, but her sympathy, weakened by his
surliness, was also limited by her ignorance of his real plight, and by
the secret preoccupation of her own existence. From the evening of the
funeral the desire to see Arthur again, to study his features, to hear
his voice, definitely took the uppermost place in her mind. She thought
of him always, and she ceased to pretend to herself that this was not
so. She continually expected him to call, or to meet some one who had
met him, or to receive a letter from him. Sh