the inconsistency between his theory and his dismay.  He saw his universe reeling before that note, and he was not a man to suffer tamely; he felt that others ought to suffer too.  It was monstrous that a fellow like this Bellew, a loose fish, a drunkard, a man who had nearly run over him, should have it in his power to trouble the serenity of Worsted Skeynes.  It was like his impudence to bring such a charge against his son.  It was like his d——­d impudence!  And going abruptly to the bell, he trod on his spaniel’s ear.

“D—–­n the dog!  Oh, poor fellow, John!” But the spaniel John, convinced at last that he had sinned, hid himself in a far corner whence he could see nothing, and pressed his chin closely to the ground.

“Ask your mistress to come here.”

Standing by the hearth, waiting for his wife, the Squire displayed to greater advantage than ever the shape of his long and narrow head; his neck had grown conspicuously redder; his eyes, like those of an offended swan, stabbed, as it were, at everything they saw.

It was not seldom that Mrs. Pendyce was summoned to the study to hear him say:  “I want to ask your advice.  So-and-so has done such and such....  I have made up my mind.”

She came, therefore, in a few minutes.  In compliance with his “Look at that, Margery,” she read the note, and gazed at him with distress in her eyes, and he looked back at her with wrath in his.  For this was tragedy.

Not to everyone is it given to take a wide view of things—­to look over the far, pale streams, the purple heather, and moonlit pools of the wild marches, where reeds stand black against the sundown, and from long distance comes the cry of a curlew—­nor to everyone to gaze from steep cliffs over the wine-dark, shadowy sea—­or from high mountainsides to see crowned chaos, smoking with mist, or gold-bright in the sun.

To most it is given to watch assiduously a row of houses, a back-yard, or, like Mrs. and Mr. Pendyce, the green fields, trim coverts, and Scotch garden of Worsted Skeynes.  And on that horizon the citation of their eldest son to appear in the Divorce Court loomed like a cloud, heavy with destruction.

So far as such an event could be realised imagination at Worsted Skeynes was not too vivid—­it spelled ruin to an harmonious edifice of ideas and prejudice and aspiration.  It would be no use to say of that event, “What does it matter?  Let people think what they like, talk as they like.”  At Worsted Skeynes (and Worsted Skeynes was every country house) there was but one set of people, one church, one pack of hounds, one everything.  The importance of a clear escutcheon was too great.  And they who had lived together for thirty-four years looked at each other with a new expression in their eyes; their feelings were for once the same.  But since it is always the man who has the nicer sense of honour, their thoughts were not the same, for Mr. Pendyce was thinking:  ’I won’t believe it—­disgracing us all!’ and Mrs. Pendyce was thinking:  ‘My boy!’