No documents and no assurances could make him lay aside a belief that the wine merchants, and the business, and his grandson were all ruined and ruinous together.

No one but a ruined man would attempt to raise money on the family estate! So they had quarrelled, and had never spoken or seen each other since.

"He shall have the estate for his life," the squire said to his son John.

"I don't think I have a right to leave it away from him.

It never has been left away from the heir.
But I'll tie it up so that he shan't cut a tree on it." John Vavasor perhaps thought that the old rule of primogeniture might under such circumstances have been judiciously abandoned--in this one instance, in his own favour.