hat time in the morning. You
shouldn't get into the habit of sending telegrams. A telegram is a thing
that means something--at least, I've always thought so. I met George
coming away from her in a deuce of a hurry. I can't write any more now.
I'm just going to have my lunch.

"Your affectionate brother,

"CHARLES PENDYCE."

She was well. She had been seeing George. With a hardened heart the
Squire went up to bed.

And Wednesday came to an end....

And so on the Thursday afternoon the brown blood mare carried Mr.
Pendyce along the lane, followed by the spaniel John. They passed the
Firs, where Bellew lived, and, bending sharply to the right, began to
mount towards the Common; and with them mounted the image of that fellow
who was at the bottom of it all--an image that ever haunted the Squire's
mind nowadays; a ghost, high-shouldered, with little burning eyes,
clipped red moustaches, thin bowed legs. A plague spot on that system
which he loved, a whipping-post to heredity, a scourge like Attila
the Hun; a sort of damnable caricature of all that a country gentleman
should be--of his love of sport and open air, of his "hardness" and his
pluck; of his powers of knowing his own mind, and taking his liquor
like a man; of his creed, now out of date, of gallantry. Yes--a kind of
cursed bogey of a man, a spectral follower of the hounds, a desperate
character--a man that in old days someone would have shot; a drinking,
white-faced devil who despised Horace Pendyce, whom Horace Pendyce
hated, yet could not quite despise. "Always one like that in a hunting
country!" A black dog on the shoulders of his order. 'Post equitem
sedet' Jaspar Bellew!

The Squire came out on the top of the rise, and all Worsted Scotton was
in sight. It was a sandy stretch of broom and gorse and heather, with a
few Scotch firs; it had no value at all, and he longed for it, as a boy
might long for the bite someone else had snatched out of his apple. It
distressed him lying there, his and yet not his, like a wife who was no
wife--as though Fortune were enjoying her at his expense. Thus was he
deprived of the fulness of his mental image; for as with all men, so
with the Squire, that which he loved and owned took definite form--a
some thing that he saw. Whenever the words "Worsted Skeynes" were in his
mind--and that was almost always--there rose before him an image defined
and concrete, however indescribable; and what ever this image was, he
knew that