us. Lyveden had found
himself violently interested in his new life before he had entered upon
it.

The next day he had accepted the tiny cabin as his future home, and had
had a fire roaring upon the hearth before nine o'clock. Colonel
Winchester, who had expected to lodge him at Girdle for the best part
of a week, had abetted his determination to take immediate possession
with a grateful heart, presenting his new tenant with some blankets and
an excellent camp-bed, and putting a waggon at his disposal for the
rest of the day. Seven o'clock that evening had found Anthony and his
dog fairly installed in their new quarters.

And now a month had gone by--to be exact, some thirty-four days, the
biggest ones, perhaps, in all Lyveden's life. In that short space of
time the man whose faith had frozen had become a zealot.

Five thousand acres of woodland and the fine frenzy of an Homeric
Quixote had wrought the miracle. Of course the soil was good, and had
been ruthlessly harrowed and ploughed into the very pink of condition
to receive such seed. For months Lyveden's enterprise had been
stifled: for months Necessity had kept his intellect chained to a
pantry-sink: such ambition as he had had was famished. To crown it
all, Love had lugged him into the very porch of Paradise, to slam the
gates in his face.... Mind and body alike were craving for some
immense distraction. In return for board and lodging for his terrier
and himself, the man would have picked oakum--furiously: but not in
Hampshire. That was the county of Paradise--Paradise Lost.

As we have seen, the bare idea of the employment had found favour in
Lyveden's eyes, and, before they had been together for half an hour,
the personality of Winchester had taken him by the arm. When, two days
later, master and man strode through the splendid havoc of the woods,
where the dead lay where they had fallen, and the quick were wrestling
for life, where the bastard was bullying the true-born, and kings were
mobbed by an unruly rabble--dogs with their paws upon the table, eating
the children's bread--where avenues and glades were choked with
thickets, where clearings had become brakes, and vistas and prospects
were screened by aged upstarts that knew no law; when they followed the
broken roads, where fallen banks sprawled on the fairway, and the
laborious rain had worn ruts into straggling ditches, where culverts
had given way and the dammed streams had spread the tra