.

He had over half a million--with power and force and courage enough to
do with it what he liked. He had fought luck undauntedly, unwearyingly,
during all those years when his hands were empty. Was he to tremble
and turn tail now, when his hands were full, when he was armoured and
weaponed at every point? He was amazed and hurt, and still more enraged,
at that fit of girlish weakness which had possessed him. He could
have beaten himself with stripes for it. But it could never happen
again--never, never!

He told himself that with proud, resolute reiteration, as he got his hat
and stick, and put in his pockets one or two papers from the desk, and
then glanced about the Board Room for what was, most likely, the last
time. Here he had won his great victory over Fate, here he had put his
enemies under his feet, and if innocent simpletons had wandered into the
company of these foes, it mattered not a whit to him that they also had
been crushed. Figuratively, he turned his back upon them now; he left
them, slain and trampled, in the Board Room behind him. They no longer
concerned him.

Figuratively, too, as he walked with firmness to the door, he stepped
over the body of old Tavender, upon the threshold, and bestowed upon
it a downward mental glance, and passed on. By the time he reached the
street, the memory of Tavender had become the merest shred of a myth. As
he strode on, it seemed to him that his daughters came again, and
took his hands, and moved lovingly beside him--lovingly and still more
admiringly than before.

CHAPTER XXII

BY the autumn of the following year, a certain small proportion of the
people inhabiting the district in Hertfordshire which set its clocks
by the dial over the stable-tower of Pellesley Court had accustomed
themselves to give the place its new name of High Thorpe. These were
for the most part the folk of peculiarly facile wits and ready powers
of adaptation, like pushing small tradesmen, and the upper servants in
county houses. An indolent and hazy compromise upon Pellesley Thorpe had
drifted into use by perhaps a larger number. To the puzzled conservatism
of the abiding huge majority nearest to the soil--the round-backed,
lumpish men who tie strings round their corduroys under the knee, and
the strong, cow-faced women who look at passers-by on the road from
the doors of dark little cottages, over radiant patches of blossoming
garden--it seemed safest to drop family names altog