Why not?  And yet—!  Just as in this spring night Felix felt so much, so very much, lying out there behind the still and moony dark, such marvellous holding of breath and waiting sentiency, so behind this innocent petition, he could not help the feeling of a lurking fatefulness.  That was absurd.  And he said:  “If you wish it, by all means.  You’ll like your Uncle Tod; as to the others, I can’t say, but your aunt is an experience, and experiences are what you want, it seems.”

Fervently, without speech, Nedda squeezed his arm.

CHAPTER IV

Stanley Freeland’s country house, Becket, was almost a show place.  It stood in its park and pastures two miles from the little town of Transham and the Morton Plough Works; close to the ancestral home of the Moretons, his mother’s family—­that home burned down by Roundheads in the Civil War.  The site—­certain vagaries in the ground—­Mrs. Stanley had caused to be walled round, and consecrated so to speak with a stone medallion on which were engraved the aged Moreton arms—­arrows and crescent moons in proper juxtaposition.  Peacocks, too—­that bird ‘parlant,’ from the old Moreton crest—­ were encouraged to dwell there and utter their cries, as of passionate souls lost in too comfortable surroundings.

By one of those freaks of which Nature is so prodigal, Stanley—­ owner of this native Moreton soil—­least of all four Freeland brothers, had the Moreton cast of mind and body.  That was why he made so much more money than the other three put together, and had been able, with the aid of Clara’s undoubted genius for rank and station, to restore a strain of Moreton blood to its rightful position among the county families of Worcestershire.  Bluff and without sentiment, he himself set little store by that, smiling up his sleeve—­for he was both kindly and prudent—­at his wife who had been a Tomson.  It was not in Stanley to appreciate the peculiar flavor of the Moretons, that something which in spite of their naivete and narrowness, had really been rather fine.  To him, such Moretons as were left were ‘dry enough sticks, clean out of it.’  They were of a breed that was already gone, the simplest of all country gentlemen, dating back to the Conquest, without one solitary conspicuous ancestor, save the one who had been physician to a king and perished without issue—­marrying from generation to generation exactly their own equals; living simple, pious, parochial lives; never in trade, never making money, having a tradition and a practice of gentility more punctilious than the so-called aristocracy; constitutionally paternal and maternal to their dependents, constitutionally so convinced that those dependents and all indeed who were not ‘gentry,’ were of different clay, that they were entirely simple and entirely without arrogance, carrying with them even now a sort of Early atmosphere of archery and home-made cordials, lavender and love of clergy, together with frequent use of the word ‘nice,’ a peculiar regularity of feature, and a complexion that was rather parchmenty.  High Church people and Tories, naturally, to a man and woman, by sheer inbred absence of ideas, and sheer inbred conviction that nothing else was nice; but withal very considerate of others, really plucky in bearing their own ills; not greedy, and not wasteful.