Of Becket, as it now was, they would not have approved at all.  By what chance Edmund Moreton (Stanley’s mother’s grandfather), in the middle of the eighteenth century, had suddenly diverged from family feeling and ideals, and taken that ‘not quite nice’ resolution to make ploughs and money, would never now be known.  The fact remained, together with the plough works.  A man apparently of curious energy and character, considering his origin, he had dropped the E from his name, and—­though he continued the family tradition so far as to marry a Fleeming of Worcestershire, to be paternal to his workmen, to be known as Squire, and to bring his children up in the older Moreton ’niceness’—­he had yet managed to make his ploughs quite celebrated, to found a little town, and die still handsome and clean-shaved at the age of sixty-six.  Of his four sons, only two could be found sufficiently without the E to go on making ploughs.  Stanley’s grandfather, Stuart Morton, indeed, had tried hard, but in the end had reverted to the congenital instinct for being just a Moreton.  An extremely amiable man, he took to wandering with his family, and died in France, leaving one daughter—­Frances, Stanley’s mother—­and three sons, one of whom, absorbed in horses, wandered to Australia and was killed by falling from them; one of whom, a soldier, wandered to India, and the embraces of a snake; and one of whom wandered into the embraces of the Holy Roman Church.

The Morton Plough Works were dry and dwindling when Stanley’s father, seeking an opening for his son, put him and money into them.  From that moment they had never looked back, and now brought Stanley, the sole proprietor, an income of full fifteen thousand pounds a year.  He wanted it.  For Clara, his wife, had that energy of aspiration which before now has raised women to positions of importance in the counties which are not their own, and caused, incidentally, many acres to go out of cultivation.  Not one plough was used on the whole of Becket, not even a Morton plough—­these indeed were unsuitable to English soil and were all sent abroad.  It was the corner-stone of his success that Stanley had completely seen through the talked-of revival of English agriculture, and sedulously cultivated the foreign market.  This was why the Becket dining-room could contain without straining itself large quantities of local magnates and celebrities from London, all deploring the condition of ‘the Land,’ and discussing without end the regrettable position of the agricultural laborer.  Except for literary men and painters, present in small quantities to leaven the lump, Becket was, in fact, a rallying point for the advanced spirits of Land Reform—­one of those places where they were sure of being well done at week-ends, and of congenial and even stimulating talk about the undoubted need for doing something, and the designs which were being entertained upon ‘the Land’ by either party.  This very heart of English country that the old Moretons