The memory of the fever of the monstrous weeks which had passed at this time was not one it was wise for a man to recall.  But it was not to be forgotten—­the hasty midnight arrival at Mount Dunstan of father and son, their haggard, nervous faces, their terrified discussions, and argumentative raging when they were shut up together behind locked doors, the appearance of legal advisers who looked as anxious as themselves, but failed to conceal the disgust with which they were battling, the knowledge that tongues were clacking almost hysterically in the village, and that curious faces hurried to the windows when even a menial from the great house passed, the atmosphere of below-stairs whispers, and jogged elbows, and winks, and giggles; the final desperate, excited preparations for flight, which might be ignominiously stopped at any moment by the intervention of the law, the huddling away at night time, the hot-throated fear that the shameful, self-branding move might be too late—­the burning humiliation of knowing the inevitable result of public contempt or laughter when the world next day heard that the fugitives had put the English Channel between themselves and their country’s laws.

Lord Tenham had died a few years later at Port Said, after descending into all the hells of degenerate debauch.  His father had lived longer—­long enough to make of himself something horribly near an imbecile, before he died suddenly in Paris.  The Mount Dunstan who succeeded him, having spent his childhood and boyhood under the shadow of the “bad lot,” had the character of being a big, surly, unattractive young fellow, whose eccentricity presented itself to those who knew his stock, as being of a kind which might develop at any time into any objectionable tendency.  His bearing was not such as allured, and his fortune was not of the order which placed a man in the view of the world.  He had no money to expend, no hospitalities to offer and apparently no disposition to connect himself with society.  His wild-goose chase to America had, when it had been considered worth while discussing at all, been regarded as being very much the kind of thing a Mount Dunstan might do with some secret and disreputable end in view.  No one had heard the exact truth, and no one would have been inclined to believe if they had heard it.  That he had lived as plain Jem Salter, and laboured as any hind might have done, in desperate effort and mad hope, would not have been regarded as a fact to be credited.  He had gone away, he had squandered money, he had returned, he was at Mount Dunstan again, living the life of an objectionable recluse—­objectionable, because the owner of a place like Mount Dunstan should be a power and an influence in the county, should be counted upon as a dispenser of hospitalities, as a supporter of charities, as a dignitary of weight.  He was none of these—­living no one knew how, slouching about with his gun, riding or walking sullenly over the roads and marshland.