Godfrey Hammond had declared that no one could conceive the exquisite torments Mr. Thorne would endure if he owned an estate with a magnificent ruin on it, some unique and priceless relic of bygone days.  “He should be able to see it from his window,” said Hammond, “and it should be his, as far as law could make it, while he should be continually conscious that in the eyes of all cultivated men he was merely its guardian.  People should write to the newspapers asserting boldly that the public had a right of free access to it, and old gentlemen with antiquarian tastes should find a little gap in a fence, and pen indignant appeals to the editor demanding to be immediately informed whether a monument of national, nay, of world-wide interest, ought not, for the sake of the public, to be more carefully protected from injury.  Local archaeological societies should come and read papers in it.  Clergymen, wishing to combine a little instruction with the pleasures of a school-feast, should arrive with van-loads of cheering boys and girls, a troop of ardent teachers, many calico flags and a brass band.  Artists, keen-eyed and picturesque, each with his good-humored air of possessing the place so much more truly than any mere country gentleman ever could, should come to gaze and sketch.  Meanwhile, Thorne should remark about twice a week that of course he could pull the whole thing down if he liked; to which every one should smile assent, recognizing an evident but utterly unimportant fact.  And then,” said Hammond solemnly, “when all the archaeologists were eating and drinking, enjoying their own theories and picking holes in their neighbors’ discoveries, the bolt should fall in the shape of an announcement that Mr. Thorne had sold the stones as building materials, and that the workmen had already removed the most ancient and interesting part.  After which he would go slowly to his grave, dying of his triumph and a broken heart.”

It was all quite true, though Godfrey Hammond might have added that all the execrations of the antiquarians would hardly have added to the burden of shame and remorse of which Mr. Thorne would have felt the weight before the last cart carried away its load from the trampled sward; that he would have regretted his decision every hour of his life; and if by a miracle he could have found himself once more with the fatal deed undone, he would have rejoiced for a moment, suffered his old torment for a little while, and then proceeded to do it again.

For a great part of Mr. Thorne’s life the boast of his power over Brackenhill had been on his lips more frequently than the twice a week of which Hammond talked.  Of late years it had not been so.  He had used his power to assure himself that he possessed it, and gradually awoke to the consciousness that he had lost it by thus using it.