“Your affectionate brother,

“CharlesPendyce.”

She was well.  She had been seeing George.  With a hardened heart the Squire went up to bed.

And Wednesday came to an end....

And so on the Thursday afternoon the brown blood mare carried Mr. Pendyce along the lane, followed by the spaniel John.  They passed the Firs, where Bellew lived, and, bending sharply to the right, began to mount towards the Common; and with them mounted the image of that fellow who was at the bottom of it all—­an image that ever haunted the Squire’s mind nowadays; a ghost, high-shouldered, with little burning eyes, clipped red moustaches, thin bowed legs.  A plague spot on that system which he loved, a whipping-post to heredity, a scourge like Attila the Hun; a sort of damnable caricature of all that a country gentleman should be—­of his love of sport and open air, of his “hardness” and his pluck; of his powers of knowing his own mind, and taking his liquor like a man; of his creed, now out of date, of gallantry.  Yes—­a kind of cursed bogey of a man, a spectral follower of the hounds, a desperate character—­a man that in old days someone would have shot; a drinking, white-faced devil who despised Horace Pendyce, whom Horace Pendyce hated, yet could not quite despise.  “Always one like that in a hunting country!” A black dog on the shoulders of his order.  ‘Post equitem sedet’ Jaspar Bellew!

The Squire came out on the top of the rise, and all Worsted Scotton was in sight.  It was a sandy stretch of broom and gorse and heather, with a few Scotch firs; it had no value at all, and he longed for it, as a boy might long for the bite someone else had snatched out of his apple.  It distressed him lying there, his and yet not his, like a wife who was no wife—­as though Fortune were enjoying her at his expense.  Thus was he deprived of the fulness of his mental image; for as with all men, so with the Squire, that which he loved and owned took definite form—­a some thing that he saw.  Whenever the words “Worsted Skeynes” were in his mind—­and that was almost always—­there rose before him an image defined and concrete, however indescribable; and what ever this image was, he knew that Worsted Scot ton spoiled it.  It was true that he could not think of any use to which to put the Common, but he felt deeply that it was pure dog-in-the-mangerism of the cottagers, and this he could not stand.  Not one beast in two years had fattened on its barrenness.  Three old donkeys alone eked out the remnants of their days.  A bundle of firewood or old bracken, a few peat sods from one especial corner, were all the selfish peasants gathered.  But the cottagers were no great matter—­he could soon have settled them; it was that fellow Peacock whom he could not settle, just because he happened to abut on the Common, and his fathers had been nasty before him.  Mr. Pendyce rode round looking at the fence his father had put up, until he came to the portion that Peacock’s father had pulled down; and here, by a strange fatality—­such as will happen even in printed records—­he came on Peacock himself standing in the gap, as though he had foreseen this visit of the Squire’s.  The mare stopped of her own accord, the spaniel John at a measured distance lay down to think, and all those yards away he could be heard doing it, and now and then swallowing his tongue.