Only Penzance had known of his reasons for going to America.  Even the family solicitors, gravely holding interviews with him and restraining expression of their absolute disapproval of such employment of his inadequate resources, knew no more than that this Mount Dunstan, instead of wasting his beggarly income at Cairo, or Monte Carlo, or in Paris as the last one had done, prefers to waste it in newer places.  The head of the firm, when he bids him good-morning and leaves him alone, merely shrugs his shoulders and returns to his letter writing with the corners of his elderly mouth hard set.

Penzance saw him off—­and met him upon his return.  In the library they sat and talked it over, and, having done so, closed the book of the episode.

*****

He sat at the table, his eyes upon the wide-spread loveliness of the landscape, but his thought elsewhere.  It wandered over the years already lived through, wandering backwards even to the days when existence, opening before the child eyes, was a baffling and vaguely unhappy thing.

When the door opened and Penzance was ushered in by a servant, his face wore the look his friend would have been rejoiced to see swept away to return no more.

Then let us take our old accustomed seat and begin some casual talk, which will draw him out of the shadows, and make him forget such things as it is not good to remember.  That is what we have done many times in the past, and may find it well to do many a time again.

He begins with talk of the village and the country-side.  Village stories are often quaint, and stories of the countryside are sometimes—­not always—­interesting.  Tom Benson’s wife has presented him with triplets, and there is great excitement in the village, as to the steps to be taken to secure the three guineas given by the Queen as a reward for this feat.  Old Benny Bates has announced his intention of taking a fifth wife at the age of ninety, and is indignant that it has been suggested that the parochial authorities in charge of the “Union,” in which he must inevitably shortly take refuge, may interfere with his rights as a citizen.  The Reverend Lewis has been to talk seriously with him, and finds him at once irate and obdurate.

“Vicar,” says old Benny, “he can’t refuse to marry no man.  Law won’t let him.”  Such refusal, he intimates, might drive him to wild and riotous living.  Remembering his last view of old Benny tottering down the village street in his white smock, his nut-cracker face like a withered rosy apple, his gnarled hand grasping the knotted staff his bent body leaned on, Mount Dunstan grinned a little.  He did not smile when Penzance passed to the restoration of the ancient church at Mellowdene.  “Restoration” usually meant the tearing away of ancient oaken, high-backed pews, and the instalment of smug new benches, suggesting suburban Dissenting chapels, such as the feudal soul revolts at.  Neither did he smile at a reference