It came to him after he had travelled largely and been for three years master of the works.  Arthur was delighted when Raymond accepted his suggestion and made his abode at North Hill.  They hunted and shot together; and Waldron, who now judged that the time for golf had come in his case, devoted the moiety of his life to that pastime.

Ironsyde worked hard and was held in respect.  The circumstance of his child had long been accepted and understood.  He exhausted his energy and patience in endeavours to maintain and advance the boy; and those justified in so doing lost no opportunity to urge on Sabina Dinnett the justice of his demand; but here nothing could change her.  She refused to recognise Raymond, or receive from him any assistance in the education and nurture of his son.  She had called him Abel, and as Abel Dinnett the lad was known.  He resembled her in that he was dark and of an excitable and uneven temperament.  He might be easily elated and as easily cast down.  Raymond, who kept a secret eye upon the child, trusted that in a few years his turn would come, though at present denied.  At first he resented the resolution that shut him out of his son’s life; but the matter had long since sunk to unimportance and he believed that when Abel came to years of understanding, he would recognise his own interests and blame those responsible for ignoring them in his childhood.  Upon this opinion hinged the future of not a few persons.  It developed into a conviction permanently established at the back of his mind; but since Sabina and others came between, he was content to let them do so and relied upon his son’s intelligence in time to come.  For years he did not again seek the child’s acquaintance after a rebuff, and made no attempt to interfere with the operations of Abel’s grandmother and mother—­to keep them wholly apart.  Thus, after all, the gratification of their purpose was devoid of savour and Ironsyde’s indifferent acquiescence robbed their will of its triumph.  He had told Mary Dinnett, through Ernest Churchouse, that she and her daughter must proceed as they thought fit and that, in any case, the last word would be with him.  Here, however, he misvalued the strength of the forces arrayed against him, and only the future proved whether the seed sowed in Abel Dinnett’s youthful heart was fertile or barren—­whether, by the blood in his own veins, he would offer soil of character to develop enmity to the man who got him, or reveal a nature slow to anger and impatient of wrath.

For Ernest Churchouse these problems offered occupation and he stood as an intermediary between the interests that clashed in the child.  He made himself responsible for a measure of the boy’s education and, sometimes, reported to Estelle such development of character as he perceived.  In secret, inspired by the rival claims of heredity and environment, Ernest strove to cast a scientific horoscope of little Abel’s probable future.  But to-day contradicted yesterday, and to-morrow proved both untrustworthy.  The child was always changing, developing new ideas, indicating new possibilities.  It appeared too soon yet to say what he would be, or predict his character and force of purpose.