On his left hand Maxwell Court rose among its woods on the brow of the hill--a splendid pile which some day would be his.

Behind him; through all the upland he had just traversed; beneath the point where he stood; along the sides of the hills, and far into the plain, stretched the land which also would be his--which, indeed, practically was already his--for his grandfather was an old man with a boundless trust in the heir on whom, his affections and hopes were centred.

The dim churches scattered over the immediate plain below; the villages clustered round them, where dwelt the toilers in these endless fields; the farms amid their trees; the cottages showing here and there on the fringes of the wood--all the equipment and organisation of popular life over an appreciable part of the English midland at his feet, depended to an extent hardly to be exaggerated, under the conditions of the England of to-day, upon him--upon his one man's brain and conscience, the degree of his mental and moral capacity.
In his first youth, of course, the thought had often roused a boy's tremulous elation and sense of romance.

Since his Cambridge days, and of late years, any more acute or dramatic perception than usual of his lot in life had been wont to bring with it rather a consciousness of weight than of inspiration.

Sensitive, fastidious, reflective, he was disturbed by remorses and scruples which had never plagued his forefathers.