Nevertheless, during the whole of the following week the ladies held little communication with John.  He lived apart from them.  In the mornings he went out with his bailiffs to inspect farms and consult about possible improvement and necessary repairs.  He had appointments with his solicitor.  There were accounts to be gone through.  He never paid a bill without verifying every item.  It was difficult to say what should be done with a farm for which a tenant could not be found even at a reduced rent.  At four o’clock he came into tea, his head full of calculations of such a complex character that even his mother could not follow the different statements to his satisfaction.  When she disagreed with him, he took up the “Epistles of St Columban of Bangor,” the “Epistola ad Sethum,” or the celebrated poem, “Epistola ad Fedolium,” written when the saint was seventy-two, and continued his reading, making copious notes in a pocket-book.  To do so he drew his chair close to the library fire, and when Kitty came quickly into the room with a flutter of skirts and a sound of laughter, he awoke from contemplation, and her singing as she ascended the stairs jarred the dreams of cloister and choir which mounted from the pages to his brain in clear and intoxicating rhapsody.

On the third of November Mrs Norton announced that the meet of the hounds had been fixed for the fifteenth, and that there would be a hunt breakfast.

“Oh, my dear mother! you don’t mean that they are coming here to lunch!”

“For the last twenty years all our side of the county has been in the habit of coming here to lunch, but of course you can shut your doors to all your friends and acquaintances.  No doubt they will think you have come down here on purpose to insult them.”

“Insult them! why should I insult them?  I haven’t seen them since I was a boy.  I remember that the hunt breakfast used to go on all day long.  Every woman in the county used to come, and they used to stay to tea, and you used to insist on a great number remaining to supper.”

“Well, you can put a stop to all that now that you have consented to come to Thornby Place, only I hope you don’t expect me to remain here to see my friends insulted.”

“But just think of the expense! and in these bad times.  You know I cannot find a tenant for the Woreington farm.  I am afraid I shall have to provide the capital and farm it myself.  Now, in the face of such losses, don’t you think that we should retrench?”

“Retrench!  A few fowls and rounds of beef!  You don’t think of retrenching when you present Stanton College with a stained glass window that costs five hundred pounds.”

“Of course, if you like it, mother...”

“I like nothing but what you like, but I really think that for you to put down the hunt breakfast the first time you honour us with a visit, would look very much as if you intended to insult the whole county.”