Much of this business was very dreary to him, some of it altogether distasteful.  Since the day of his parting with Marcella Boyce his only real pleasures had lain in politics or books.  Politics, just as they were growing absorbing to him, must, for a while at any rate, be put aside; and even books had not fared as well as they might have been expected to do in the country quiet.  Day after day he walked or rode about the muddy lanes of the estate, doing the work that seemed to him to be his, as best he could, yet never very certain of its value; rather, spending his thoughts more and more, with regard to his own place and function in the world, on a sort of mental apologetic which was far from stimulating; sorely conscious the while of the unmatched charm and effectiveness with which his grandfather had gone about the same business; and as lonely at heart as a man can well be—­the wound of love unhealed, the wound of friendship still deep and unconsoled.  To bring social peace and progress, as he understood them, to this bit of Midland England a man of first-rate capacities was perhaps sacrificing what ambition would have called his opportunities.  Yet neither was he a hero to himself nor to the Buckinghamshire farmers and yokels who depended on him.  They had liked the grandfather better, and had become stolidly accustomed to the grandson’s virtues.

The only gleam in the grey of his life since he had determined about Christmas-time to settle down at the Court had come from Mr. French’s letter.  That letter, together with Mr. Boyce’s posthumous note, which contained nothing, indeed, but a skilful appeal to neighbourliness and old family friendship, written in the best style of the ex-Balkan Commissioner, had naturally astonished him greatly.  He saw at once what she would perceive in it, and turned impatiently from speculation as to what Mr. Boyce might actually have meant, to the infinitely more important matter, how she would take her father’s act.  Never had he written anything with greater anxiety than he devoted to his letter to Mrs. Boyce.  There was in him now a craving he could not stay, to be brought near to her again, to know how her life was going.  It had first raised its head in him since he knew that her existence and Wharton’s were finally parted, and had but gathered strength from the self-critical loneliness and tedium of these later months.

Mrs. Boyce’s reply couched in terms at once stately and grateful, which accepted his offer of service on her own and her daughter’s behalf, had given him extraordinary pleasure.  He turned it over again and again, wondering what part or lot Marcella might have had in it, attributing to her this cordiality or that reticence; picturing the two women together in their black dresses—­the hotel, the pergola, the cliff—­all of which he himself knew well.  Finally, he went up to town, saw Mr. French, and acquainted himself with the position and prospects of the Mellor estate, feeling himself a sort of intruder, yet curiously happy in the business.  It was wonderful what that poor sickly fellow had been able to do in the last two years; yet his thoughts fell rather into amused surmise as to what she would find it in her restless mind to do in the next two years.