As to these secret influences, they were plain enough to many people.  Melrose who had been present on the day when the case was tried had left the court-house in a fury, in company with a certain ill-famed solicitor, one Nash, who had worked up the defence, and had served the master of Threlfall before in various litigations connected with his estates, such as the respectable family lawyers in Carlisle and Pengarth would have nothing to do with.  Nash told his intimates that night that Brand would rue his audacity, and the prophecy soon dismally fulfilled itself.  The local bank to which Brand owed money had been accustomed for years to deal with very large temporary balances—­representing the rents of half the Threlfall estates.  Nash was well known to the manager, as one of those backstairs informants, indispensable in a neighbourhood where every farmer wanted advances—­now on his crops—­now on his stock—­and the leading bank could only escape losses by the maintenance of a surprising amount of knowledge as to each man’s circumstances and character.  Nash was observed on one or two occasions going in and out of the bank’s private room, at moments corresponding with some of the worst crises of Brand’s fortunes.  And with regard to other creditors, no one could say precisely how they were worked on, but they certainly showed a surprising readiness to join in the harrying of a struggling and helpless man.

In any case Brand believed, and had good cause for believing, that he had been ruined by Melrose in revenge for the county court action.  His two sons believed it also.

The tired man sat brooding over these things in the little hot room.  His wife came in, and stood at the door observing him, twisting her apron in a pair of wet hands.

“Yo’ll have your tea?”

“Aye.  Where are t’ lads?”

“Johnnie’s gotten his papers.  He’s gane oot to speak wi’ the schoolmaster.  He’s thinkin’ o’ takkin’ his passage for t’ laast week in t’ year.”

Brand made no reply.  Johnnie, the elder son, was the apple of his eye.  But an uncle had offered him half his passage to Quebec, and his parents could not stand in the way.

“An’ Will?”

“He’s cleanin’ hissel’.”

As she spoke, wavering steps were heard on the stairs, and while she returned to her kitchen the younger son, Will Brand, opened the door of the front room.

He was a lanky, loose-jointed youth of twenty, with a long hatchet face.  His movements were strangely clumsy, and his eye wandered.  The neighbours had always regarded him as feeble-witted; and about a year before this time an outburst of rough practical joking on the lad’s part—­sudden jumpings out from hedges to frighten school-children going home, or the sudden whoopings and howlings of a white-sheeted figure, for the startling of lovers in the gloaming—­had drawn the attention of the Whitebeck policeman to his “queerness.”  Only his parents knew of what fits of rage he was capable.