that his
reluctance almost wronged his own beloved home. Harry Graham wanted to
persuade him to come and spend Christmas at his home, with his lively
family, but Guy felt as if gaiety was not for him, even if he could
enjoy it. He did not wish to drown his present feelings, and steadily,
though gratefully, refused this as well as one or two other friendly
invitations.

After lingering in vain till the last day of term, he wrote to desire
that his own room and the library might be made ready for him, and that
'something' might be sent to meet him at Moorworth.

Railroads had come a step nearer, even to his remote corner of the world,
in the course of the last three years; but there was still thirty miles
of coach beyond, and these lay through a part of the country he had
never seen before. It was for the most part bleak, dreary moor, such as,
under the cold gray wintry sky, presented nothing to rouse him from his
musings on the welcome he might have been at that very moment receiving
at Hollywell.

A sudden, dip in the high ground made it necessary for the coach to
put on the drag, and thus it slowly entered a village, which attracted
attention from its wretched appearance. The cottages, of the rough stone
of the country, were little better than hovels; slates were torn off,
windows broken. Wild-looking uncombed women, in garments of universal
dirt colour, stood at the doors; ragged children ran and shrieked after
the coach, the church had a hole in the roof, and stood tottering in
spite of rude repairs; the churchyard was trodden down by cattle, and
the whole place only resembled the pictures of Irish dilapidation.

'What miserable place is this?' asked a passenger. 'Yes, that's what all
gentlemen ask,' replied the coachman; 'and well you may. There's not a
more noted place for thieves and vagabonds. They call it Coombe Prior.'

Guy well knew the name, though he had never been there. It was a distant
offset of his own property, and a horrible sense of responsibility for
all the crime and misery there came over him.

'Is there no one to look; after it?' continued the traveller. 'No
squire, no clergyman?'

'A fox-hunting parson,' answered the coachman; 'who lives half-a-dozen
miles off, and gallops over for the service.'

Guy knew that the last presentation had been sold in the days of his
grandfather's extravagance, and beheld another effect of ancestral sin.

'Do you know who is the owner of the place?'

'Y