Go, my reader, if the day is dull, and you feel inclined to moralize—­ for whatever may be said to the contrary, there are less useful occupations—­and look at your village churchyard.  What do you see before you?  A plot of enclosed ground backed by a grey old church, a number of tombstones more or less decrepit, and a great quantity of little oblong mounds covered with rank grass.  If you have any imagination, any power of thought, you will see more than that.  First, with the instinctive selfishness of human nature, you will recognize your own future habitation; perhaps your eye will mark the identical spot where the body you love must lie through all seasons and weathers, through the slow centuries that will flit so fast for you, till the crash of doom.  It is good that you should think of that, although it makes you shudder.  The English churchyard takes the place of the Egyptian mummy at the feast, or the slave in the Roman conqueror’s car—­it mocks your vigour, and whispers of the end of beauty and strength.

Probably you need some such reminder.  But if, giving to the inevitable the sigh that is its due, you pursue the vein of thought, it may further occur to you that the plot before you is in a sense a summary of the aspirations of humanity.  It marks the realization of human hopes, it is the crown of human ambitions, the grave of human failures.  Here, too, is the end of the man, and here the birthplace of the angel or the demon.  It is his sure inheritance, one that he never solicits and never squanders; and, last, it is the only certain resting-place of sleepless, tired mortality.

Here it was that they brought Hilda, and the old squire, and laid them side by side against the coffin of yeoman Caresfoot, whose fancy it had been to be buried in stone, and then, piling primroses and blackthorn blooms upon their graves, left them to their chilly sleep.  Farewell to them, they have passed to where as yet we may not follow.  Violent old man and proud and lovely woman, rest in peace, if peace be the portion of you both!

To return to the living.  The news of the sudden decease of old Mr. Caresfoot; of the discovery of Philip’s secret marriage and the death of his wife; of the terms of the old man’s will, under which, Hilda being dead, and having only left a daughter behind her, George inherited all the unentailed portion of the property, with the curious provision that he was never to leave it back to Philip or his children; of the sudden departure of Miss Lee, and of many other things, that were some of them true and some of them false, following as they did upon the heels of the great dinner-party, and the announcement made thereat, threw the country-side into a state of indescribable ferment.  When this settled down, it left a strong and permanent residuum of public indignation and contempt directed against Philip, the more cordially, perhaps, because he was no longer a rich man.  People very rarely express contempt or indignation against a rich man who happens to be their neighbour in the country, whatever he may have done.  They keep their virtue for those who are impoverished, or for their unfortunate relations.  But for Philip it was felt that there was no excuse and no forgiveness; he had lost both his character and his money, and must therefore be cut, and from that day forward he was cut accordingly.