It was at his brother’s funeral that Hubert met for the first time his uncle, Mr. Burnett.  Mr. Burnett had spent the greater part of his life in New Zealand, where he had made a large fortune by sheep-farming and investments in land.  He had seemed to be greatly taken with his nephew, and for many years it was understood that he would leave him the greater part, if not the whole, of his fortune.  But Mr. Burnett had come under the influence of some poor relations, some distant cousins, the Watsons, and had eventually decided to adopt their daughter Emily and leave her his fortune.  He did not dare intimate his change of mind to his sister; but the news having reached Mrs. Price in various rumours, she wrote to her brother asking him to confirm or deny these rumours; and when he admitted their truth, Mrs. Price never spoke to him again.  She was a determined woman, and the remembrance of the wrong done to her son never left her.

While the other children had been a torment and disgrace, Hubert had been to his parents a consolation and a blessing.  They had feared that he too might turn to betting and drink, but he had never shown sign of low tastes.  He played no games, nor did he care for terriers or horses; but for books and drawing, and long country walks.  Immediately on hearing of his disinheritance he had spoken at once of entering a profession; and for many months this was the subject of consideration in the Rectory.  Hubert joined in these discussions willingly, but he could not bring himself to accept the army or the bar.  It was indeed only necessary to look at him to see that neither soldier’s tunic nor lawyer’s wig was intended for him; and it was nearly as clear that those earnest eyes, so intelligent and yet so undetermined in their gaze, were not those of a doctor.

But if his eyes failed to predict his future, his hands told the story of his life distinctly enough—­those long, white, languid hands, what could they mean but art?  And very soon Hubert began to draw, evincing some natural aptitude.  Then an artist came into the neighbourhood, the two became friends, and went together on a long sketching tour.  Life in the open air, the shade of the hedge, the glare of the highway, the meditation of the field, the languor of the river-side, the contemplation of wooded horizons, was what Hubert’s pastoral nature was most fitted to enjoy; and, for the sake of the life it afforded him, he pursued the calling of a landscape painter long after he had begun to feel his desire turning in another direction.  When the landscape on the canvas seemed hopelessly inadequate, he laid aside the brush for the pencil, and strove to interpret the summer fields in verse.  From verse he drifted into the article and the short story, and from the story into the play.  And it was in this last form that he felt himself strongest, and various were the dramas and comedies that he dreamed from year’s end to year’s end.

While he was in the midst of his period of verse-writing his mother died, and in the following year, just as he was working at his stories, he received a telegram calling him to attend his father’s death-bed.  When the old man was laid in the shadow of the weather-beaten village church, Hubert gathered all his belongings and bade farewell for ever to the Shropshire rectory.