“You can tell Colonel Barrington I’m coming to Silverdale,” he said.

The lawyer looked at him curiously.  “Would there be any use in asking you to reconsider?”

Winston laughed.  “No,” he said.  “Now, I rather like the way you talked to me, and, if it wouldn’t be disloyalty to the Colonel, I should be pleased if you would undertake to put me in due possession of my property.”

He said nothing further, and the lawyer sat down to write Colonel Barrington.

“Mr. Courthorne proves obdurate,” he said.  “He is, however, by no means the type of man I expected to find, and I venture to surmise that you will eventually discover him to be a less undesirable addition to Silverdale than you are at present inclined to fancy.”

CHAPTER VIII

WINSTON COMES TO SILVERDALE

There was warmth and brightness in the cedar-boarded general room of Silverdale Grange, and most of the company gathered there basked in it contentedly after their drive through the bitter night.  Those who came from the homesteads lying farthest out had risked frost-nipped hands and feet, for when Colonel Barrington held a levee at the Grange nobody felt equal to refusing his invitation.  Neither scorching heat nor utter cold might excuse compliance with the wishes of the founder of Silverdale, and it was not until Dane, the big middle-aged bachelor, had spoken very plainly, that he consented to receive his guests in time of biting frost dressed otherwise than as they would have appeared in England.

Dane was the one man in the settlement who dare remonstrate with its ruler, but it was a painful astonishment to the latter when he said in answer to one invitation, “I have never been frost-bitten, sir, and I stand the cold well, but one or two of the lads are weak in the chest, and this climate was never intended for bare-shouldered women.  Hence, if I come, I shall dress myself to suit it.”

Colonel Barrington stared at him for almost a minute, and then shook his head.  “Have it your own way,” he said.  “Understand that in itself I care very little for dress, but it is only by holding fast to every traditional nicety we can prevent ourselves sinking into Western barbarism, and I am horribly afraid of the thin end of the wedge.”

Dane having gained his point said nothing further, for he was one of the wise and silent men who know when to stop, and that evening he sat in a corner watching his leader thoughtfully, for there was anxiety in the Colonel’s face.  Barrington sat silent near the ample hearth whose heat would scarcely have kept water from freezing but for the big stove, and disdaining the dispensation made his guests, he was clad conventionally, though the smooth black fabric clung about him more tightly than it had once been intended to do.  His sister stood, with the stamp of a not wholly vanished beauty still clinging to her