ngry glance.

"How can I tell you, when there's nothing to tell? I went to his club.
He's not living there now. He's got rooms, nobody knows where. I waited
all the afternoon. Left a message at last for him to come down here
to-morrow. I've sent for Paramor, and told him to come down too. I won't
put up with this sort of thing."

Mrs. Pendyce looked out of the window, but there was nothing to see save
the ha-ha, the coverts, the village spire, the cottage roofs, which for
so long had been her world.

"George won't come down here," she said.

"George will do what I tell him."

Again Mrs. Pendyce shook her head, knowing by instinct that she was
right.

Mr. Pendyce stopped putting on his waist-coat.

"George had better take care," he said; "he's entirely dependent on me."

And as if with those words he had summed up the situation, the
philosophy of a system vital to his son, he no longer frowned. On
Mrs. Pendyce those words had a strange effect. They stirred within her
terror. It was like seeing her son's back bared to a lifted whip-lash;
like seeing the door shut against him on a snowy night. But besides
terror they stirred within her a more poignant feeling yet, as though
someone had dared to show a whip to herself, had dared to defy that
something more precious than life in her soul, that something which was
of her blood, so utterly and secretly passed by the centuries into
her fibre that no one had ever thought of defying it before. And there
flashed before her with ridiculous concreteness the thought: 'I've got
three hundred a year of my own!' Then the whole feeling left her, just
as in dreams a mordant sensation grips and passes, leaving a dull ache,
whose cause is forgotten, behind.

"There's the gong, Horace," she said. "Cecil Tharp is here to dinner.
I asked the Barters, but poor Rose didn't feel up to it. Of course they
are expecting it very soon now. They talk of the 15th of June."

Mr. Pendyce took from his wife his coat, passing his arms down the satin
sleeves.

"If I could get the cottagers to have families like that," he said, "I
shouldn't have much trouble about labour. They're a pig-headed lot--do
nothing that they're told. Give me some eau-de-Cologne, Margery."

Mrs. Pendyce dabbed the wicker flask on her husband's handkerchief.

"Your eyes look tired," she said. "Have you a headache, dear?"

CHAPTER VIII

COUNCIL AT WORSTED SKEYNES

It was on the following evening--the evening o