As his riches increased, he bought a stately country mansion, named Beechwood, not far from Rose Cottage, ever dear in memory to him.  Another son, Walter, was born there, and everything seemed to smile on him in his beautiful country home.  Luxmore now sought to injure him by diverting the water from his cloth-mills, and leaving his great wheels idle.  Halifax could have taken him to law; but, instead of that, he set up a strange, new-fangled thing, called a steam-engine; and his mills did better than ever.

Finding it useless to fight against the resourceful Halifax, Luxmore went abroad, and left his son, Lord Ravenel, alone at Luxmore Hall.  The young man, despite his father’s unfriendly conduct, was still a frequent visitor at Beechwood, and when poor Muriel died, his grief at her loss was only less than that of her parents.

The years passed by, and happiness still reigned at Beechwood; but Ravenel had deserted them, until one day John Halifax met him, greatly changed from the gentle youth of the past, at Norton Bury.  John invited him to ride over with him to Enderley.

“Enderly?  How strange the word sounds!  Yet I should like to see the place again,” said Ravenel, who decided to accompany John Halifax and Phineas Fletcher in their drive back to Beechwood.  He inquired kindly for all the family, and was told that Guy and Walter were as tall as himself, while the daughter——­

“Your daughter?” said his lordship, with a start.  “Oh, yes; I recollect—­Baby Maud!  Is she at all like—­like——­”

“No,” said John Halifax.  Neither said more than this; but it seemed as if their hearts warmed to one another, knitted by the same tender remembrance.

IV.—­The Journey’s End

Lord Ravenel had returned to reside again at Luxmore Hall, and his visits to Beechwood became as regular as they had been in the old days at the Halifax home, when Muriel was alive.  It was the society of Maud in which his lordship now delighted, though he never forgot the serene and happy days he had spent with her blind sister.

Before long, Lord Ravenel sought to be regarded as suitor for the hand of Maud, who would thus have become the future Countess of Luxmore.  He said that he would wait two years for her, if her father wished it; but John Halifax would make him no promise, and urged him rather to endeavour first to become a more worthy man, so that he might redeem the evil reputation which the conduct of his own father had brought upon the name of Luxmore.

“Do you recognise what you were born to be?” said Halifax to him.  “Not only a nobleman, but a gentleman; not only a gentleman, but a man—­man made in the image of God.  Would to heaven that any poor word of mine could make you feel all that you are—­and all that you might be!”

“You mean, Mr. Halifax, what I might have been—­now it is too late.”

“There is no such word as ‘too late’ in the wide world—­nay, not in the universe.”