Then he asked after the health of his guest and expressed sympathy for her sorrow and great loss.

“He’d been so much better lately that it was a shock,” she said, “but he died as he wanted to die—­as all Ironsydes do die—­without an illness.  It is a tradition that never seems to fail.  That reconciled us in a way.  And you—­how are you?  You seldom come to Bridport nowadays.”

Mr. Churchouse rarely talked about himself.

“True.  I have been immersed in literary work and getting on with my magnum opus:  ‘The Church Bells of Dorset.’  You see one does not obtain much help here—­no encouragement.  Not that I expect it.  We men of letters have to choose between being hermits, or humbugs.”

“I always thought a hermit was a humbug,” said Jenny, smiling for the first time.

“Not always.  When I say ‘hermit,’ I mean ‘recluse.’  With all the will to be a social success and identify myself with the welfare of the place in which I dwell, my powers are circumscribed.  Do not think I put myself above the people, or pretend any intellectual superiority, or any nonsense of that sort.  No, it is merely a question of time and energy.  My antiquarian work demands both, and so I am deprived by duty from mixing in the social life as much as I wish.  This is not, perhaps, understood, and so I get a character for aloofness, which is not wholly deserved.”

“Don’t worry,” said Miss Ironsyde.  “Everybody cares for you.  People don’t think about us and our doings half as much as we are prone to fancy.  I liked your last article in the Bridport Gazette.  Only I seemed to have read most of it before.”

“Probably you have.  The facts, of course, were common property.  My task is to collect data and retail them in a luminous and illuminating way.”

“So you do—­so you do.”

He looked away, where Daniel stood by himself with his hands in his pockets and his eyes on the river.

“A great responsibility for one so young; but he will rise to it.”

“D’you mean his brother, or the Mill?”

“Both,” answered Ernest Churchouse.  “Both.”

Mrs. Dinnett came down the garden.

“The mourning coach is at the door,” she said.

“Daniel insisted that we went home in a mourning coach,” explained Miss
Ironsyde.  “He felt the funeral was not ended until we returned home. 
That shows imagination, so you can’t say he hasn’t got any.”

“You can never say anybody hasn’t got anything,” declared Mr. Churchouse.  “Human nature defeats all calculations.  The wisest only generalise about it.”

CHAPTER II

At ‘the Tiger’

The municipal borough of Bridport stretches itself luxuriously from east to west beneath a wooded hill.  Southward the land slopes to broad water-meadows where rivers meet and Brit and Asker wind to the sea.  Evidences of the great local industry are not immediately apparent; but streamers and wisps of steam scattered above the red-tiled roofs tell of work, and westward, where the land falls, there stand shoulder to shoulder the busy mills.