‘Nobody can be as important as Chicksands looks!’ he said to himself angrily.  Even the smiling manner which ignored their six months’ quarrel had annoyed him hugely.  It was a piece of condescension—­an impertinence.  Oh, of course Chicksands was the popular man, the greatest power in the county, looked up to, and listened to by everybody.  The Squire knew very well that he himself was ostracized, even hated; that there had been general chuckling in the neighbourhood over his rough handling by the County Committee, and that it would please a good many people to see all his woods commandeered and ‘cut clean.’

Six months before, his inborn pugnacity would only have amused itself with the situation.  He was a rebel and a litigant by nature.  Smooth waters had never attracted him.

Yet now—­though he would never have admitted it—­he was often conscious of a flagging will and a depressed spirit.  The loneliness of his life, due entirely to himself, had, during Elizabeth Bremerton’s absence, begun sharply to find him out.  He had no true fatherly relation with any of his children.  Desmond loved him—­why, he didn’t know.  He didn’t believe any of the others cared anything at all about him.  Why should they?

The Squire’s eyes followed the three distant walkers, Elizabeth, graceful and vigorous, between the other two.  And the conviction gripped him that all the pleasure, the liveableness of life—­such as still remained possible—­depended for him on that central figure.  He looked back on his existence before her arrival at Mannering, and on what it had been since.  Why, she had transformed it!

How could he cage and keep her?—­the clever, gracious creature!  For the first time in his life he was desperately, tremulously humble.  He placed no dependence at all on his name or his possessions.  Elizabeth was not to be bought.

But management—­power—­for the things she believed in—­they might tempt her.  He would give them to her with both hands, if only she would settle down beside him, take a freehold of that chair and table in the library, for life!

He looked back gloomily to his clumsy proposal about her mother, and to her remarks about Pamela.  It would be indeed intolerable if his children got in his way!  The very notion put him in a fever.

If that tiresome fellow, Dell, had not interrupted them the night before, what would have happened?

He had all the consciousness of a man still in the prime of life, in spite of his white hair; for he had married at twenty-one, and had never—­since they grew up—­seemed to himself very much older than his elder children.  He had but a very dim memory of his wife.  Sometimes he felt as if, notwithstanding the heat of boyish passion which had led him to marry her, he had never really known her.  There were moments when he had an uncomfortable suspicion that for some years before her death she had silently but irrevocably passed judgment upon him, and had withdrawn her inner life from him.  Friends of hers had written to him after her death of beautiful traits and qualities in her of which he himself had known nothing.  In any case they were not traits and qualities which appealed in the long run to a man of his pursuits and temperament.  He was told that Pamela had inherited some of them.