“George,” said Mr. Pendyce, pursuing his own thoughts, “has no gumption.  He’d never manage a man like Peacock—­and you encourage him!  He ought to marry and settle down.”

Mrs. Pendyce, the flush dying in her cheeks, said: 

“George is very like poor Hubert.”

Horace Pendyce drew his watch from beneath his pillow.

“Ah!” But he refrained from adding, “Your people!” for Hubert Totteridge had not been dead a year.  “Ten minutes to eight!  You keep me talking here; it’s time I was in my bath.”

Clad in pyjamas with a very wide blue stripe, grey-eyed, grey-moustached, slim and erect, he paused at the door.

“The girls haven’t a scrap of imagination.  What do you think Bee said?  ‘I hope he hasn’t lost his train.’  Lost his train!  Good God! and I might have—­I might have——­” The Squire did not finish his sentence; no words but what seemed to him violent and extreme would have fulfilled his conception of the danger he had escaped, and it was against his nature and his training to exaggerate a physical risk.

At breakfast he was more cordial than usual to Gregory, who was going up by the first train, for as a rule Mr. Pendyce rather distrusted him, as one would a wife’s cousin, especially if he had a sense of humour.

“A very good fellow,” he was wont to say of him, “but an out-and-out Radical.”  It was the only label he could find for Gregory’s peculiarities.

Gregory departed without further allusion to the object of his visit.  He was driven to the station in a brougham by the first groom, and sat with his hat off and his head at the open window, as if trying to get something blown out of his brain.  Indeed, throughout the whole of his journey up to town he looked out of the window, and expressions half humorous and half puzzled played on his face.  Like a panorama slowly unrolled, country house after country house, church after church, appeared before his eyes in the autumn sunlight, among the hedgerows and the coverts that were all brown and gold; and far away on the rising uplands the slow ploughman drove, outlined against the sky: 

He took a cab from the station to his solicitors’ in Lincoln’s Inn Fields.  He was shown into a room bare of all legal accessories, except a series of Law Reports and a bunch of violets in a glass of fresh water.  Edmund Paramor, the senior partner of Paramor and Herring, a clean-shaven man of sixty, with iron-grey hair brushed in a cockscomb off his forehead, greeted him with a smile.

“Ah, Vigil, how are you?  Up from the country?”

“From Worsted Skeynes.”

“Horace Pendyce is a client of mine.  Well, what can we do for you?  Your Society up a tree?”

Gregory Vigil, in the padded leather chair that had held so many aspirants for comfort, sat a full minute without speaking; and Mr. Paramor, too, after one keen glance at his client that seemed to come from very far down in his soul, sat motionless and grave.  There was at that moment something a little similar in the eyes of these two very different men, a look of kindred honesty and aspiration.  Gregory spoke at last.