‘I know it is no good my trying to dissuade you.’

’None on earth.  If you knew it all you would not try to dissuade me.  Before I thought of asking her to be my wife and yet I thought of that very soon but before I ever thought of that, I told her that when she wanted a brother’s help I would give it her.  Of course I was thinking of the property that she shouldn’t be turned out of her father’s house like a beggar.  I hadn’t any settled plan then how could I?  But I meant her to understand that when her father died I would be the same to her that I am to you.  If you were alone, in distress, would I not go to you?’

‘But I have no one else, Will,’ said she, stretching out her hand to him where he stood.

‘That makes no difference,’ he replied, almost roughly.  A promise is a promise, and I resolved from the first that my promise should hold good in spite of my disappointment.  Dear, dear it seems but the other day when I made it and now, already, everything is changed.’  As he was speaking the servant entered the room, and told him that the horse and gig were ready for him.  ‘I shall just do it nicely,’ said he, looking at his watch.  ’I have over an hour.  God bless you, Mary.  I shan’t be away long.  You may be sure of that.’

‘I don’t suppose you can tell as yet, Will.’

’What should keep me long?  I shall see Green as I go by, and that is half of my errand.  I dare say I shan’t stay above a night down in Somersetshire.’

‘You’ll have to give some orders about the estate.’

’I shall not say a word on the subject to anybody; that is, not to anybody there.  I am going to look after her, and not the estate.’  Then he stooped down and kissed his sister, and in another minute was turning the corner out of the farm-yard on to the road at a quick pace, not losing a foot of ground in the turn, in that fashion of rapidity which the horses at Plaistow Hall soon learned from their master.  The horse is a closely sympathetic beast, and will make his turns, and do his trottings, and comport himself generally in strict unison with the pulsation of his master’s heart.  When a horse won’t jump it is generally the case that the inner man is declining to jump also, let the outer man seem ever so anxious to accomplish the feat.

Belton, who was generally very communicative with his servants, always talking to any man he might have beside him in his dog-cart about the fields and cattle and tillage around him, said not a word to the boy who accompanied him on this occasion.  He had a good many things to settle in his mind before he got to London, and he began upon the work as soon as he had turned the corner out of the farm-yard.  As regarded this Belton estate, which was now altogether his own, he had always bad doubts and qualms qualms of feeling rather than of conscience; and he had, also, always entertained a strong family ambition.  His people, ever so far back, had been Beltons of