Before him, a symmetrical mass of grey stone and green ivy, Belpher Castle towered against a light blue sky.  On either side rolling park land spread as far as the eye could see, carpeted here and there with violets, dotted with great oaks and ashes and Spanish chestnuts, orderly, peaceful and English.  Nearer, on his left, were rose-gardens, in the centre of which, tilted at a sharp angle, appeared the seat of a pair of corduroy trousers, whose wearer seemed to be engaged in hunting for snails.  Thrushes sang in the green shrubberies; rooks cawed in the elms.  Somewhere in the distance sounded the tinkle of sheep bells and the lowing of cows.  It was, in fact, a scene which, lit by the evening sun of a perfect spring day and fanned by a gentle westerly wind, should have brought balm and soothing meditations to one who was the sole heir to all this Paradise.

But Percy, Lord Belpher, remained uncomforted by the notable co-operation of Man and Nature, and drew no solace from the reflection that all these pleasant things would one day be his own.  His mind was occupied at the moment, to the exclusion of all other thoughts, by the recollection of that painful scene in Bow Street Police Court.  The magistrate’s remarks, which had been tactless and unsympathetic, still echoed in his ears.  And that infernal night in Vine Street police station . . .  The darkness . . .  The hard bed. . .  The discordant vocalising of the drunk and disorderly in the next cell. . . .  Time might soften these memories, might lessen the sharp agony of them; but nothing could remove them altogether.

Percy had been shaken to the core of his being.  Physically, he was still stiff and sore from the plank bed.  Mentally, he was a volcano.  He had been marched up the Haymarket in the full sight of all London by a bounder of a policeman.  He had been talked to like an erring child by a magistrate whom nothing could convince that he had not been under the influence of alcohol at the moment of his arrest. (The man had said things about his liver, kindly be-warned-in-time-and-pull-up-before-it-is-too-late things, which would have seemed to Percy indecently frank if spoken by his medical adviser in the privacy of the sick chamber.) It is perhaps not to be wondered at that Belpher Castle, for all its beauty of scenery and architecture, should have left Lord Belpher a little cold.  He was seething with a fury which the conversation of Reggie Byng had done nothing to allay in the course of the journey from London.  Reggie was the last person he would willingly have chosen as a companion in his hour of darkness.  Reggie was not soothing.  He would insist on addressing him by his old Eton nickname of Boots which Percy detested.  And all the way down he had been breaking out at intervals into ribald comments on the recent unfortunate occurrence which were very hard to bear.

He resumed this vein as they alighted and rang the bell.

“This,” said Reggie, “is rather like a bit out of a melodrama.  Convict son totters up the steps of the old home and punches the bell.  What awaits him beyond?  Forgiveness?  Or the raspberry?  True, the white-haired butler who knew him as a child will sob on his neck, but what of the old dad?  How will dad take the blot of the family escutcheon?”