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Heart and brain, Wingfold was full of both humour and pathos.  In their walks and drives, many a serious subject would give occasion to the former, and many a merry one to the latter.  Sometimes he would take a nursery-rime for his theme, and expatiate upon it so, that at one instant Barbara would burst into the gayest laughter, and the next have to restrain her tears.  Rarely would Wingfold enter a sick-chamber, especially that of a cottage, with a long face and a sermon in his soul; almost always he walked lightly in, with a cheerful look, and not seldom an odd story on his tongue, well pleased when he could make the sufferer laugh—­better pleased sometimes when he had made him sorry.  He did not find those that laughed the readiest the hardest to make sorry.  He moved his people by infecting their hearts with the feeling in his own.

Having now for many years cared only for the will of God, he was full of joy.  For the will of the Father is the root of all his children’s gladness, of all their laughter and merriment.  The child that loves the will of the Father, is at the heart of things; his will is with the motion of the eternal wheels; the eyes of all those wheels are opened upon him, and he knows whence he came.  Happy and fearless and hopeful, he knows himself the child of him from whom he came, and his peace and joy break out in light.  He rises and shines.  Bliss creative and energetic there is none other, on earth or in heaven, than the will of the Father.

CHAPTER LVII.

THE BARONET’S WILL.

Arthur Lestrange was sharply troubled when he found he was to see no more of Barbara.  He went again and again to Wylder Hall, but neither mother nor daughter would receive him.  When he learned that Miss Brown was for sale, he bought her for love of her mistress.  All the explanation he could get from lady Ann was, that the young woman’s mother was impossible; she was more than half a savage.

Time’s wheels went slow thereafter at Mortgrange.  Sir Wilton missed his firstborn.  Whatever annoyed him in his wife or any of her children, fed the desire for Richard.  Arthur did not please him.  He had no way distinguished himself—­and some men are annoyed when their sons prove only a little better than themselves.  Percy was a poisoned thorn in his side:  he was even worse than his father.  All his thoughts took refuge in Richard.

He had become dissatisfied with his agent, and although he had never taken an interest in business, distrust made him now look into things a little.  He called his lawyer from London, and had him make a thorough investigation.  Dismissing thereupon his agent, he would have Arthur take charge of the estate; but the young man, with an inborn dislike to figures, flatly refused, saying he preferred the army.  Sir Wilton did not like the army:  he had been in it himself, and had left it in a hurry—­no one ever knew why.