Janet sent a few dry lines to summon me over in April, a pleasant month on heath-lands when the Southwest sweeps them.  The squire was dead.  I dropped my father at Bulsted.  I could have sworn to the terms of the Will; Mr. Burgin had little to teach me.  Janet was the heiress; three thousand pounds per annum fell to the lot of Harry Lepel Richmond, to be paid out of the estate, and pass in reversion to his children, or to Janet’s should the aforesaid Harry die childless.

I was hard hit, and chagrined, but I was not at all angry, for I knew what the Will meant.  My aunt Dorothy supplied the interlining eagerly to mollify the seeming cruelty.  ’You have only to ask to have it all, Harry.’  The sturdy squire had done his utmost to forward his cherished wishes after death.  My aunt received five-and-twenty thousand pounds, the sum she had thrown away.  ’I promised that no money of mine should go where the other went,’ she said.

The surprise in store for me was to find how much this rough-worded old man had been liked by his tenantry, his agents and servants.  I spoke of it to Janet.  ‘They loved him,’ she said.  ’No one who ever met him fairly could help loving him.’  They followed him to his grave in a body.  From what I chanced to hear among them, their squire was the man of their hearts:  in short, an Englishman of the kind which is perpetually perishing out of the land.  Janet expected me to be enthusiastic likewise, or remorseful.  She expected sympathy; she read me the long list of his charities.  I was reminded of Julia Bulsted commenting on my father, with her this he did and that.  ‘He had plenty,’ I said, and Janet shut her lips.  Her coldness was irritating.

What ground of accusation had she against me?  Our situation had become so delicate that a cold breath sundered us as far as the Poles.  I was at liberty to suspect that now she was the heiress, her mind was simply obedient to her grandada’s wish; but, as I told my aunt Dorothy, I would not do her that injustice.

‘No,’ said Dorothy; ’it is the money that makes her position so difficult, unless you break the ice.’

I urged that having steadily refused her before, I could hardly advance without some invitation now.

‘What invitation?’ said my aunt.

‘Not a corpse-like consent,’ said I.

‘Harry,’ she twitted me, ‘you have not forgiven her.’  That was true.

Sir Roderick and Lady Ilchester did not conceal their elation at their daughter’s vast inheritance, though the lady appealed to my feelings in stating that her son Charles was not mentioned in the Will.  Sir Roderick talked of the squire with personal pride:—­’Now, as to his management of those unwieldy men, his miners they sent him up the items of their complaints.  He took them one by one, yielding here, discussing there, and holding to his point.  So the men gave way; he sent them a month’s pay to reward