“Yo’ can bring him in there,” he said sulkily to Undershaw.  “There’s mebbe a bed upstairs we can bring doon.”

He threw open the drawing-room—­a dreary, disused room, with its carpets rolled up in one corner, and its scanty furniture piled in another.  The candle held by Mrs. Dixon lit up the richly decorated ceiling.

“Can’t you do anything better?” asked Undershaw, turning upon her vehemently.  “Don’t you keep a spare bedroom in this place?”

“Noa, we doan’t!” said Mrs. Dixon, with answering temper.  “There isn’t a room upstairs but what’s full o’ Muster Melrose’s things.  Yo’ mun do wi’ this, or naethin’.”

Undershaw submitted, and Faversham’s bearers gently laid him down, spreading their coats on the bare floor to receive him, till a bed could be found.  Dixon and his wife, in a state of pitiable disturbance, went off to look for one, while Undershaw called after them: 

“And I warn you that to-morrow you’ll have to find quarters for two nurses!”

Thus, without any conscious action on his own part, and in the absence of its formidable master, was Claude Faversham brought under the roof of Threlfall Tower.

IV

On the evening of the following day, Mr. Edmund Melrose arrived in Pengarth by train from London, hired a one-horse wagonette, and drove out to the Tower.

His manners were at no time amiable, but the man who had the honour of driving him on this occasion, and had driven him occasionally before, had never yet seen him in quite so odious a temper.  This was already evident at the time of the start from Pengarth, and thenceforward the cautious Cumbrian preserved an absolute and watchful silence, to the great annoyance of Melrose, who would have welcomed any excuse for ill-humour.  But as nothing beyond the curtest monosyllables were to be got out of his companion, and as the rich beauty of the May landscape was entirely lost upon himself, Melrose was reduced at last in the course of his ten miles’ drive to scanning once more the copy of the Times which he had brought with him from the south.  The news of various strikes and industrial arbitrations which it contained had already enraged him; and enraged him again as he looked through it.  The proletariat, in his opinion, must be put down and kept down; that his own class began to show a lamentable want of power to do either was the only public matter that ever really troubled him.  So far as his life was affected by the outside world at all, except as a place where auctions took place, and dealers’ shops abounded, it was through this consciousness of impending social disaster, this terror as of a rapidly approaching darkness bearing the doom of the modern world in its bosom, which intermittently oppressed him, as it has oppressed and still overshadows innumerable better men of our day.