all bargains; but he was a man who liked to be generous when generously treated.  Consequently he almost overdid his neighbour with butter and cream, and occasionally sent in quarters of lamb and sweetbreads to make up the weight.  I don’t know that the offerings were particularly valued; but friendship was engendered.  Runciman, too, had his grounds for quarrelling with those who had taken up the management of the Bragton property after the squire’s death, and had his own antipathy to the Honourable Mrs. Morton and her grandson, the Secretary of Legation.  When the law-suit was going on he had been altogether on Reginald Morton’s side.  It was an affair of sides, and quite natural that Runciman and the attorney should be friendly with the new-comer at Hoppet Hall, though there were very few points of personal sympathy between them.

Reginald Morton was no sportsman, nor was he at all likely to become a member of the Dillsborough Club.  It was currently reported of him in the town that he had never sat on a horse or fired off a gun.  As he had been brought up as a boy by the old squire this was probably an exaggeration, but it is certain that at this period of his life he had given up any aptitudes in that direction for which his early training might have suited him.  He had brought back with him to Hoppet Hall many cases of books which the ignorance of Dillsborough had magnified into an enormous library, and he was certainly a sedentary, reading man.  There was already a report in the town that he was engaged in some stupendous literary work, and the men and women generally looked upon him as a disagreeable marvel of learning.  Dillsborough of itself was not bookish, and would have regarded any one known to have written an article in a magazine almost as a phenomenon.

He seldom went to church, much to the sorrow of Mr. Surtees, who ventured to call at the house and remonstrate with him.  He never called again.  And though it was the habit of Mr. Surtees’ life to speak as little ill as possible of any one, he was not able to say any good of Mr. Morton.  Mr. Mainwaring, who would never have troubled himself though his parishioner had not entered a place of worship once in a twelvemonth, did say many severe things against his former landlord.  He hated people who were unsocial and averse to dining out, and who departed from the ways of living common among English country gentlemen.  Mr. Mainwaring was, upon the whole, prepared to take the other side.

Reginald Morton, though he was now nearly forty, was a young looking handsome man, with fair hair, cut short, and a light beard, which was always clipped.  Though his mother had been an innkeeper’s daughter in Montreal he had the Morton blue eyes and the handsome well-cut Morton nose.  He was nearly six feet high, and strongly made, and was known to be a much finer man than the Secretary of Legation, who was rather small, and supposed to be not very robust.