“The second,” Melrose resumed, after a somewhat long pause, and with a sarcastic intonation, “is that you should resist the very natural temptation of exhibiting me to the world as a penitent and reformed character.  In that document you have just read you suggest to me—­first, that I should retire from three lawsuits in which, whatever other people may think, I conceive that I have a perfectly good case; second”—­he ticked the items off on the long tapering finger of his left hand—­“that I should rebuild a score or two of cottages it would not pay me to rebuild—­in which I force no one to live—­and which I shall pull down when it pleases me, just to teach a parcel of busybodies to mind their own business; third—­that I should surrender, hands down, to a lot of trumpery complaints and grievances got up partly to spite a landlord, partly to get money out of him; and fourthly—­with regard to the right of way—­that I should let that young prig Tatham, a lad just out of the nursery, dictate to me, bring the whole country about my ears, and browbeat me out of my rights.  Now—­I warn you—­I shall do none of these things!”

The speaker paused a moment, and then turned impetuously on his companion.

“Have you any reason so far to complain of my conduct toward you?”

“Complain?  You have been only too amazingly, incredibly generous.”

Melrose’s hand made a disdainful movement.

“I did what suited me.  And I told you, to begin with, it would not suit me to run my estate as though it were a University Settlement.  Handle me gently—­that’s all.  You’ve had your way about some of the farms—­you’ll get it no doubt with regard to others.  But don’t go about playing the reformer—­on this dramatic scale!—­at my expense.  I don’t believe in this modern wish-wash; and I don’t intend to don the white sheet.”

He rose, and lighting another cigarette, he dropped a log on the fire, and stood with his back to it, quietly smoking.  But his eyes were all fierce life under the dome of his forehead, and his hand shook a little.

Faversham sat absolutely still.  Rushing through his veins was the sense of something incredible and intoxicating.  The word “million” rang in his ears.  He was conscious of the years behind him—­their poverty, their thwarted ambitions, their impotent discontent.  And suddenly the years before him lit up; all was possible; all was changed.  Yet as he sat there his pulses hurrying, words coming to his lips which dropped away again, he became conscious of two or three extremely sharp visualizations.

A room in one of the Mainstairs cottages, containing a bed, and on it a paralyzed girl, paralyzed after diphtheria—­the useless hands—­the vacant, miserable look—­other beds in the same room filling it up—­the roof so low that it seemed to be crushing down on the girl—­holes in the thatch rudely mended.

Again—­a corner in the Mainstairs churchyard, filled with small, crowded graves, barely grass-grown; the “Innocents’ Corner.”