e why I purposely made this chapter so long.

You have an accurate picture of what goes on during all the snowy months
on that wild North water!

CHAPTER III.

THE PLOTTER.

An old gentleman and a tall girl were walking in the secluded grounds of
a great house that had once belonged to an unhappy Prince. The place was
very near London, yet that suggestive hum of the City never seemed to
pierce the deep glades of the park; the rooks talked and held councils,
and tried culprits, and stole, and quarrelled as freely as they might
have done in the wilds of Surrey or Wiltshire; the rabbits swarmed, and
almost every south-country species of wild bird nested and enjoyed life
in the happy, still woods and shrubberies. Modern--very
modern--improvements had been added to the body of the old house, but
there was nothing vulgar or ostentatious. Everything about the place,
from the old red palace to the placid herd of Alderney cows that grazed
in a mighty avenue, spoke of wealth--wealth solid and well-rooted. There
was no sign of shoddy anywhere; the old gentleman had bought the place
at an enormous price, and he had left all the ancient work untouched;
but he would have stables, laundry, tennis-court, and so on through the
offices and outside buildings, fitted out according to rational
principles of sanitation, and, if the truth be told, he would rather
have seen healthy ugly stables than the most quaint and curious of
living-rooms that ever spread typhoid.

Mr. Cassall was a man of peculiarly modern type. From his youth upward
he had never once acknowledged himself beaten, though he had known
desperate circumstances; he saw that, as our civilization goes, money is
accounted a rough gauge of merit, and a man's industry, tenacity,
sobriety, self-control, and even virtue, are estimated and popularly
assessed according to the amount of money which he owns, and he resolved
that, let who will fail, he at least would have money and plenty of it.
He bent his mind on one end for forty years; he was unscrupulous in all
respects so long as he could keep within the law; he established a
monopoly in his business on the ruins of scores of small firms which he
crushed by weight of metal; he had no pity, no consideration, no
remorse, in business hours; and he succeeded just as any other man of
ability will succeed if he gives himself up body and soul to
money-making. He never was proud; he was only hard. To his niece, whom
he passion