always continued to be—­independent of Melrose; and Melrose knew his own interests well enough not to interfere with an obstinate man’s religion.  While Tyson, after five years, passed on triumphantly to a lucrative agency in the Dukeries, having won a reputation for tact and patience in the impossible service of a mad master, which would carry him through life.  Melrose, being Melrose, found it hopeless to replace him satisfactorily; and, as he continued to buy land greedily year after year, the neglected condition of his immense estate became an ever-increasing scandal to the county.

Meanwhile, for some years after the departure of Netta, Lady Tatham was obliged for reason of health to spend the winters on the Riviera, and she and her boy were only at Duddon for the summer months.  Intercourse between her and her cousin Edmund Melrose was never renewed, and her son grew up in practical ignorance of the relationship.  When, however, the lad was nearing the end of his Eton school days Duddon became once more the permanent home, summer and winter, of mother and son, and young Lord Tatham, curly-haired, good-humoured, and good-hearted, became thenceforward the favourite and princeling of the countryside.  On the east and north, the Duddon estates marched with Melrose’s property.  Occasions of friction constantly arose, but the determination on each side to have no more communication with the other than was absolutely necessary generally composed any nascent dispute; so long at least as Lady Tatham and a very diplomatic agent were in charge.

But at the age of twenty-four, Harry Tatham succeeded to the sole management of his estates, and his mother soon realized that her son was not likely to treat their miserly neighbour with the same patience as herself.

And with the changes in human life, went changes even more subtle and enduring in the Cumbria county itself.  Those were times of crisis for English agriculture.  Wheat-lands went back to pasture; and a surplus population, that has found its way for generations to the factory towns, began now to turn toward the great Canadian spaces beyond the western sea.  Only the mountains still rose changeless and eternal, at least to human sense; “ambitious for the hallowing” of moon and sun; keeping their old secrets, and their perpetual youth.

And after twenty years Threlfall Tower became the scene of another drama, whereof what has been told so far is but the prologue.

III

It was a May evening, and Lydia Penfold, spinster, aged twenty-four, was sketching in St. John’s Vale, that winding valley which, diverging from the Ambleside-Keswick road in an easterly direction, divides the northern slopes of the Helvellyn range from the splendid mass of Blencathra.