e
village church rose above them.

For ten years Linton had left vacant Oldrestham Hall, and when at last
it became known that he and his wife were to return from an
incomprehensible wandering, the village, which for four centuries had
turned a feudal eye toward the Hall, was wrung with a prospect of
change, a proper change. The great family pew in Oldrestham church would
be occupied each Sunday morning by a fat, happy-faced, utterly
squire-looking man, who would be dutifully at his post when the parish
was stirred by a subscription list. Then, for the first time in many
years, the hunters would ride in the early morning merrily out through
the park, and there would be also shooting parties, and in the summer
groups of charming ladies would be seen walking the terrace, laughing on
the lawns and in the rose gardens. The village expected to have the
perfectly legal and fascinating privilege of discussing the performances
of its own gentry.

The first intimation of calamity was in the news that Linton had rented
all the shooting. This prepared the people for the blow, and it fell
when they sighted the master of Oldrestham Hall. The older villagers
remembered then that there had been nothing in the youthful Linton to
promise a fat, happy-faced, dignified, hunting, shooting over-lord, but
still they could not but resent the appearance of the new squire. There
was no conceivable reason for his looking like a gaunt ascetic, who
would surprise nobody if he borrowed a sixpence from the first yokel he
met in the lanes.

Linton was in truth three inches more than six feet in height, but he
had bowed himself to five feet eleven inches. His hair shocked out in
front like hay, and under it were two spectacled eyes which never seemed
to regard anything with particular attention. His face was pale and full
of hollows, and the mouth apparently had no expression save a chronic
pout of the under-lip. His hands were large and raw boned but uncannily
white. His whole bent body was thin as that of a man from a long
sick-bed, and all was finished by two feet which for size could not be
matched in the county.

He was very awkward, but apparently it was not so much a physical
characteristic as it was a mental inability to consider where he was
going or what he was doing. For instance, when passing through a gate it
was not uncommon for him to knock his side viciously against one of the
posts. This was because he dreamed almost always, and