‘Where have you been?’ Mutimer asked, indifferently.

‘For a walk.  Into the wood.’

He was examining her, for the disquiet of her countenance could not escape his notice.

’Why did you go alone?  It would have done Alice good to get her out a little.’

‘I’m afraid she wouldn’t have come.’

He hesitated.

‘Has she been saying anything to you?’

‘Only that she is troubled and anxious.’

They walked on together in silence, Mutimer with bowed head and knitted brows.

CHAPTER XXVI

The making a virtue of necessity, though it argues lack of ingenuousness, is perhaps preferable to the wholly honest demonstration of snarling over one’s misfortunes.  It may result in good even to the hypocrite, who occasionally surprises himself with the pleasure he finds in wearing a front of nobility, and is thereby induced to consider the advantages of upright behaviour adopted for its own sake.  Something of this kind happened in the case of Richard Mutimer.  Seeing that there was no choice but to surrender his fortune, he set to work to make the most of abdication, and with the result that the three weeks occupied in settling his affairs at New Wanley and withdrawing from the Manor were full of cheerful activity.  He did not meet Hubert Eldon, all business being transacted through Mr. Yottle.  When he heard from the latter that it was Eldon’s intention to make a clean sweep of mines, works, and settlements, though for a moment chagrined, he speedily saw that such action, by giving dramatic completeness to his career at Wanley and investing its close with something of tragic pathos, was in truth what he should most have desired.  It enabled him to take his departure with an air of profounder sadness; henceforth no gross facts would stand in the way of his rhetoric when he should enlarge on the possibilities thus nipped in the bud.  He was more than ever a victim of cruel circumstances; he could speak with noble bitterness of his life’s work having been swept into oblivion.

He was supported by a considerable amount of epistolary sympathy.  The local papers made an interesting story of what had happened in the old church at Wanley, and a few of the London journals reported the circumstances; in this way Mutimer became known to a wider public than had hitherto observed him.  Not only did his fellow-Unionists write to encourage and moralise, but a number of those people who are ever ready to indite letters to people of any prominence, the honestly admiring and the windily egoistic, addressed communications either to Wanley Manor or to the editor of the ‘Fiery Cross.’  Mutimer read eagerly every word of each most insignificant scribbler; his eyes gleamed and his cheeks grew warm.  All such letters he brought to Adela, and made her read them aloud; he stood with his hands behind his back, his face slightly elevated and at a listening angle.  At the end he regarded her, and his look said:  ‘Behold the man who is your husband!’