hat no hint of the escapade reached Mr Ffolliot's ears.

For the fact is that being somewhat tightly kept at home, the young
Ffolliots were more than something of a nuisance when they went abroad;
and as several of them generally were abroad, in their train did
mischief and destruction follow.

For three hundred years there had been Ffolliots at Redmarley; of the
last three owners two were married and childless, and the one
immediately preceding Mr Hilary Ffolliot was a bachelor. But the fact
that the Manor had not for over a hundred years descended from father
to son, in no way affected the love each reigning Ffolliot felt for it.

There was something about Redmarley that seized the imagination and the
affection of the dwellers there. The little grey stone village that
lay so lovingly along the banks of the Marle was so enduring, so
valorous in its sturdy indifference to time; in the way its gabled
cottages under their overhanging eaves faced summer sun and winter
rains, and instead of crumbling away seemed but to stand the firmer and
more dignified in their cheery eld.

The Ffolliots were good landlords. No leaking roofs or defective walls
were complained of at Redmarley. Never was Ffolliot yet who had not
realised the unique quality of the village, and done his best to
maintain it. It never grew, rarely was a house to let, and the jerry
builder was an unknown evil. It was a healthy village, too, set high
in the clean Cotswold air. Big farms surrounded it, the nearest
railway line was three miles off, and the nearest station almost seven.

Of course there was poverty and a good deal of rheumatism among the
older inhabitants, but on the whole the periodic outbursts of
industrial discontent and unrest that convulsed other parts of England
seemed to pass Redmarley by.

Had the Manor stood empty or the vicar been a poor man with a large
family, doubtless things would have been uncomfortable enough to stir
the villagers out of their habitual philosophic acceptance of the "rich
man in his castle, the poor man at his gate" as an inevitable and
immutable law. But they couldn't actively dislike either squire or
parson, and although the agricultural labourer is slow of speech he is
not lacking in shrewdness, and those at Redmarley realised that things
would be much worse than they were if Squire and Parson were suddenly
eliminated.

Hilary Ffolliot liked the role of landed proprietor in the abstract.
He would no