But—­no silly exaggeration!  He straightened himself in his saddle.  He was doing plenty of good work elsewhere, work with which Melrose did not trouble himself to interfere; work which would gradually tell upon the condition and happiness of the estate.  Put that against the other.  Men are not plaster saints—­or, still less, live ones, with the power of miracle; but struggling creatures of flesh and blood, who do, not what they will, but what they can.

And suddenly he seemed once more to be writing to Lydia Penfold.  How often he had written to her during these two months!  He recalled the joy of the earlier correspondence, in which he had been his natural self, pleading, arguing, planning; showing all the eagerness—­the sincere eagerness—­there was in him, to make a decent job of his agency, to stand well with his new neighbours—­above all with “one slight girl.”

And her letters to him—­sweet, frank, intelligent, sympathetic—­they had been his founts of refreshing, his manna by the way.  Until that fatal night, when Melrose had crushed in him all that foolish optimism and self-conceit with which he had entered into the original bargain!  Since then, he knew well that his letters had chilled and disappointed her; they had been the letters of a slave.

And now this awful business at Mainstairs!  Bessie Dobbs, the girl of eighteen—­Lydia’s friend—­who had been slowly dying since the diphtheria epidemic of the year before, was dead at last, after much suffering; and he did not expect to find the child of eight, her little sister, still alive.  There were nearly a score of other cases, and there were three children down with scarlet fever, besides some terrible attacks of blood-poisoning—­one after childbirth—­due probably to some form of the scarlet fever infection, acting on persons weakened by the long effect of filthy conditions.  What would Lydia say, when she knew—­when she came?  From her latest letter it was not clear to him on what day she would reach home.  After making his inspection he would ride on to Green Cottage and inquire.  He dreaded to meet her; and yet he was eager to defend himself; his mind was already rehearsing all that he would say.

A long lane, shaded by heavy trees, made an abrupt turning, and he saw before him the Mainstairs village—­one straggling street of wretched houses, mostly thatched, and built of “clay-lump,” whitewashed.  In a county of prosperous farming, and good landlords, where cottages had been largely rebuilt during the preceding century, this miserable village, with various other hamlets and almost all the cottages attached to farms on the Melrose estate, were the scandal of the countryside.  Roofs that let in rain and wind, clay floors, a subsoil soaked in every possible abomination, bedrooms “more like dens for wild animals than sleeping-places for men and women,” to quote a recent Government report, and a polluted water supply!—­what more could reckless human living, aided by human carelessness and cruelty, have done to make a hell of natural beauty?