but the interest to Government had to be paid all the same, whether the men worked well or ill.  Then the roof of the Hall let in the melted snow-water this winter; and, on examination, it turned out that a new roof was absolutely required.  The men who had come about the advances made to Osborne by the London money-lender, had spoken disparagingly of the timber on the estate—­’Very fine trees—­sound, perhaps, too, fifty years ago, but gone to rot now; had wanted lopping and clearing.  Was there no wood-ranger or forester?  They were nothing like the value young Mr. Hamley had represented them to be of.’  The remarks had come round to the squire’s ears.  He loved the trees he had played under as a boy as if they were living creatures; that was on the romantic side of his nature.  Merely looking at them as representing so many pounds sterling, he had esteemed them highly, and had had, until now, no opinion of another by which to correct his own judgment.  So these words of the valuers cut him sharp, although he affected to disbelieve them, and tried to persuade himself that he did so.  But, after all, these cares and disappointments did not touch the root of his deep resentment against Osborne.  There is nothing like wounded affection for giving poignancy to anger.  And the squire believed that Osborne and his advisers had been making calculations, based upon his own death.  He hated the idea so much—­it made him so miserable—­that he would not face it, and define it, and meet it with full inquiry and investigation.  He chose rather to cherish the morbid fancy that he was useless in this world—­born under an unlucky star—­that all things went badly under his management.  But he did not become humble in consequence.  He put his misfortunes down to the score of Fate—­not to his own; and he imagined that Osborne saw his failures, and that his first-born grudged him his natural term of life.  All these fancies would have been set to rights could he have talked them over with his wife; or even had he been accustomed to mingle much in the society of those whom he esteemed his equals; but, as has been stated, he was inferior in education to those who should have been his mates; and perhaps the jealousy and mauvaise honte that this inferiority had called out long ago, extended itself in some measure to the feelings he entertained towards his sons—­less to Roger than to Osborne, though the former was turning out by far the most distinguished man.  But Roger was practical; interested in all out-of-doors things, and he enjoyed the details, homely enough, which his father sometimes gave him of the every-day occurrences which the latter had noticed in the woods and the fields.  Osborne, on the contrary, was what is commonly called ‘fine;’ delicate almost to effeminacy in dress and in manner; careful in small observances.  All this his father had been rather proud of in the days when he had looked forward to a brilliant career at Cambridge for his son; he had