‘I can’t help it!’ he exclaimed to Mr. Wyvern one right, after a day of peculiar annoyance.  ’We are all men, it is true; but for the brotherhood—­feel it who can!  I am illiberal, if you like, but in the presence of those fellows I feel that I am facing enemies.  It seems to me that I have nothing in common with them but the animal functions.  Absurd?  Yes, of course, it is absurd; but I speak of how intercourse with them affects me.  They are our enemies, yours as well as mine; they are the enemies of every man who speaks the pure English tongue and does not earn a living with his hands.  When they face me I understand what revolution means; some of them look at me as they would if they had muskets in their hands.’

‘You are not conciliating,’ remarked the vicar.

’I am not, and cannot be.  They stir the worst feelings in me; I grow arrogant, autocratic.  As long as I have no private dealings with them I can consider their hardships and judge their characters dispassionately; but I must not come to close quarters.’

‘You have special causes of prejudice.’

’True.  If I were a philosopher I should overcome all that.  However, my prejudice is good in one way; it enables me thoroughly to understand the detestation with which they regard me and the like of me.  If I had been born one of them I should be the most savage anarchist.  The moral is, that I must hold apart.  Perhaps I shall grow cooler in time.’

The special causes of prejudice were quite as strong on the side of the workmen; Hubert might have been far less aristocratic in bearing, they would have disliked him as cordially.  Most of them took it as a wanton outrage that they should be driven from the homes in which they had believed themselves settled for life.  The man Redgrave—­he of the six feet two who had presented the address to Mutimer—­was a powerful agent of ill-feeling; during the first few days he was constantly gathering impromptu meetings in New Wanley and haranguing them violently on the principles of Socialism.  But in less than a week he had taken his departure, and the main trouble seemed at an end.

Mrs. Eldon was so impatient to return to the Manor that a room was prepared for her as soon as possible, and she came from her house at Agworth before Mutimer had been gone a week.  Through the summer her strength had failed rapidly; it was her own conviction that she could live but a short time longer.  The extreme agitation caused by the discovery of the will had visibly enfeebled her; it was her one desire to find herself once more in her old home, and there to breathe her last.  The journey from Agworth cost her extreme suffering; she was prostrate, almost lifeless, for three days after it.  But her son’s society revived her.  Knowing him established in his family possessions, she only cared to taste for a little while this unhoped-for joy.  Lying on a couch in her familiar chamber, she delighted to have flowers brought to her from the garden, even leaves from the dear old trees, every one of which she knew as a friend.  But she had constant thought for those upon whose disaster her own happiness was founded; of Adela she spoke often.