Faversham made a quick and sparing meal in his own room, and then adjourning to his newly furnished office ran eagerly through the various papers and proposals which he had to lay before his employer.

As he did so, he was more conscious than ever before of the enormity of Melrose’s whole career as a landowner.  The fact was that the estate had been for years a mere field for the display of its owner’s worst qualities—­caprice, miserliness, jealous or vindictive love of power.  The finance of it mattered nothing to him.  Had he been a poorer man his landed property might have had a chance; he would have been forced to run it more or less on business lines.  But his immense income came to him apparently from quite other sources—­mines, railways, foreign investments; and with all the human relations involved in landowning he was totally unfit to deal.

Hence these endless quarrels with his tenants to whom he never allowed a lease; these constant evictions; these litigations as to improvements, compensation, and heaven knows what.  The land was naturally of excellent quality, and many a tenant came in with high hopes, only to find that the promises on the strength of which he had taken his farm were never fulfilled, and that if it came to lawyers, Melrose generally managed “to best it.”  Hence, too, the rotten, insanitary cottages—­maintained, Faversham could almost swear, for the mere sake of defying the local authorities and teaching “those Socialist fools” a lesson.  Hence the constant charges of persecution for political reasons; and hence, too, this bad case of the Brands, which had roused such a strong and angry sympathy in the neighbourhood that Faversham felt the success of his own regime must be endangered unless some means could be found, compatible with Melrose’s arrogance, of helping the ruined family.

Well, there in those clear typewritten sheets, lay his suggestions for dealing with these various injustices and infamies.  They were moderate.  Expensive for the moment, they would be economical in the long run.  He had given them his best brains and his hardest work.  And he had taken the best advice.  But they meant, no doubt, a complete change in the administration and personnel of the estate.

Faversham stepped into the garden, and, hanging over the low wall which edged the sandstone cliff, he looked out over the gorge of the river, across the woods, into the ravines and gullies of the fells.  Mountain and wood stood dark against a saffron sky.  In the dim blue above it Venus sailed.  A light wind stirred the trees and the stream.  Along the river meadows he could hear the cows munching and see their dusky forms moving through a thin mist.  The air was amethyst and gold, and the beautiful earth shone through it, ennobled by the large indistinctness, the quiet massing of the evening tones.

His heart withdrew itself into some inner shrine where it might be with Lydia.  She represented to him some force, some help, to which he turned.