Michael nodded, saluting, so to speak, the signpost into the future as he passed it.

“I had already determined to do that,” he said.  “I had determined, at any rate, to ask your permission to do so.  It is clear that my mother wants me, and no other consideration can weigh with that.”

Lord Ashbridge still remained completely self-sufficient.

“I am glad you take that view of it,” he said.  “I think that is all I have to say.”

Now Michael was an adept at giving; as indicated before, when he gave, he gave nobly, and he could not only outwardly disregard, but he inwardly cancelled the wonderful ungenerosity with which his father received.  That did not concern him.

“I will make arrangements to come at once,” he said, “if you can receive me to-day.”

“That will hardly be worth while, will it?  I am taking your mother back to Ashbridge tomorrow.”

Michael got up in silence.  After all, this gift of himself, of his time, of his liberty, of all that constituted life to him, was made not to his father, but to his mother.  It was made, as his heart knew, not ungrudgingly only, but eagerly, and if it had been recommended by the doctor that she should go to Ashbridge, he would have entirely disregarded the large additional sacrifice on himself which it entailed.  Thus it was not owing to any retraction of his gift, or reconsideration of it, that he demurred.

“I hope you will—­will meet me half-way about this, sir,” he said.  “You must remember that all my work lies in London.  I want, naturally, to continue that as far as I can.  If you go to Ashbridge it is completely interrupted.  My friends are here too; everything I have is here.”

His father seemed to swell a little; he appeared to fill the room.

“And all my duties lie at Ashbridge,” he said.  “As you know, I am not of the type of absentee landlords.  It is quite impossible that I should spend these months in idleness in town.  I have never done such a thing yet, nor, I may say, would our class hold the position they do if we did.  We shall come up to town after Easter, should your mother’s health permit it, but till then I could not dream of neglecting my duties in the country.”

Now Michael knew perfectly well what his father’s duties on that excellently managed estate were.  They consisted of a bi-weekly interview in the “business-room” (an abode of files and stags’ heads, in which Lord Ashbridge received various reports of building schemes and repairs), of a round of golf every afternoon, and of reading the lessons and handing the offertory-box on Sunday.  That, at least, was the sum-total as it presented itself to him, and on which he framed his conclusions.  But he left out altogether the moral effect of the big landlord living on his own land, and being surrounded by his own dependents, which his father, on the other hand, so vastly over-estimated.  It was clear that there was not likely to be much accord between them on this subject.