ew had an interest for him personally it could hardly have
possessed to the same degree for any other man. On his left hand Maxwell
Court rose among its woods on the brow of the hill--a splendid pile
which some day would be his. Behind him; through all the upland he had
just traversed; beneath the point where he stood; along the sides of the
hills, and far into the plain, stretched the land which also would be
his--which, indeed, practically was already his--for his grandfather was
an old man with a boundless trust in the heir on whom, his affections
and hopes were centred. The dim churches scattered over the immediate
plain below; the villages clustered round them, where dwelt the toilers
in these endless fields; the farms amid their trees; the cottages
showing here and there on the fringes of the wood--all the equipment and
organisation of popular life over an appreciable part of the English
midland at his feet, depended to an extent hardly to be exaggerated,
under the conditions of the England of to-day, upon him--upon his one
man's brain and conscience, the degree of his mental and moral capacity.

In his first youth, of course, the thought had often roused a boy's
tremulous elation and sense of romance. Since his Cambridge days, and of
late years, any more acute or dramatic perception than usual of his lot
in life had been wont to bring with it rather a consciousness of weight
than of inspiration. Sensitive, fastidious, reflective, he was disturbed
by remorses and scruples which had never plagued his forefathers. During
his college days, the special circumstances of a great friendship had
drawn him into the full tide of a social speculation which, as it
happened, was destined to go deeper with him than with most men. The
responsibilities of the rich, the disadvantages of the poor, the
relation of the State to the individual--of the old Radical dogma of
free contract to the thwarting facts of social inequality; the Tory
ideal of paternal government by the few as compared with the Liberal
ideal of self-government by the many: these commonplaces of economical
and political discussion had very early become living and often sore
realities in Aldous Raeburn's mind, because of the long conflict in him,
dating from his Cambridge life, between the influences of birth and
early education and the influences of an admiring and profound affection
which had opened to him the gates of a new moral world.

Towards the close of his