Janet went to him, and shortly after drove him to the station for London.  My aunt Dorothy had warned me that she was preparing some deed in my favour, and as I fancied her father to have gone to London for that purpose, and supposed she would now venture to touch on it, I walked away from the East gates of the park as soon as I heard the trot of her ponies, and was led by an evil fate (the stuff the fates are composed of in my instance I have not kept secret) to walk Westward.  Thither my evil fate propelled me, where accident was ready to espouse it and breed me mortifications innumerable.  My father chanced to have heard the particulars of Squire Beltham’s will that morning:  I believe Captain William’s coachman brushed the subject despondently in my interests; it did not reach him through Julia.

He stood outside the Western gates, and as I approached, I could perceive a labour of excitement on his frame.  He pulled violently at the bars of the obstruction.

‘Richie, I am interdicted house and grounds!’ he called, and waved his hand toward the lodge:  ‘they decline to open to me.’

‘Were you denied admission?’ I asked him.

’—­Your name, if you please, sir?—­Mr. Richmond Roy.—­We are sorry we have orders not to admit you.  And they declined; they would not admit me to see my son.’

‘Those must be the squire’s old orders,’ I said, and shouted to the lodge-keeper.

My father, with the forethoughtfulness which never forsook him, stopped me.

’No, Richie, no; the good woman shall not have the responsibility of letting me in against orders; she may be risking her place, poor soul!  Help me, dear lad.’

He climbed the bars to the spikes, tottering, and communicating a convulsion to me as I assisted him in the leap down:  no common feat for one of his age and weight.

He leaned on me, quaking.

‘Impossible!  Richie, impossible!’ he cried, and reviewed a series of interjections.

It was some time before I discovered that they related to the Will.  He was frenzied, and raved, turning suddenly from red to pale under what I feared were redoubtable symptoms, physical or mental.  He came for sight of the Will; he would contest it, overthrow it.  Harry ruined?  He would see Miss Beltham and fathom the plot;—­angel, he called her, and was absurdly exclamatory, but in dire earnest.  He must have had the appearance of a drunken man to persons observing him from the Grange windows.

My father was refused admission at the hall-doors.

The butler, the brute Sillabin, withstood me impassively.

Whose orders had he?

Miss Ilchester’s.

‘They are afraid of me!’ my father thundered.

I sent a message to Janet.

She was not long in coming, followed by a footman who handed a twist of note-paper from my aunt Dorothy to my father.  He opened it and made believe to read it, muttering all the while of the Will.