It became known that my father was at Bulsted.

I saw trouble one morning on Janet’s forehead.

We had a conversation that came near to tenderness; at last she said:  ’Will you be able to forgive me if I have ever the misfortune to offend you?’

‘You won’t offend me,’ said I.

She hoped not.

I rallied her:  ‘Tut, tut, you talk like any twelve-years-old, Janet.’

‘I offended you then!’

‘Every day! it’s all that I care much to remember.’

She looked pleased, but I was so situated that I required passion and abandonment in return for a confession damaging to my pride.  Besides, the school I had been graduating in of late unfitted me for a young English gentlewoman’s shades and intervolved descents of emotion.  A glance up and a dimple in the cheek, were pretty homely things enough, not the blaze I wanted to unlock me, and absolutely thought I had deserved.

Sir Roderick called her to the library on business, which he was in the habit of doing ten times a day, as well as of discussing matters of business at table, ostentatiously consulting his daughter, with a solemn countenance and a transparently reeling heart of parental exultation.  ‘Janet is supreme,’ he would say:  ’my advice is simple advice; I am her chief agent, that is all.’  Her chief agent, as director of three Companies and chairman of one, was perhaps competent to advise her, he remarked.  Her judgement upon ordinary matters he agreed with my grandfather in thinking consummate.

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.