CHAPTER IV.
Stanley Freeland's country house, Becket, was almost a show place.
It stood in its park and pastures two miles from the little town of Transham and the Morton Plough Works; close to the ancestral home of the Moretons, his mother's family--that home burned down by Roundheads in the Civil War.

The site--certain vagaries in the ground--Mrs.Stanley had caused to be walled round, and consecrated so to speak with a stone medallion on which were engraved the aged Moreton arms--arrows and crescent moons in proper juxtaposition.

Peacocks, too--that bird 'parlant,' from the old Moreton crest--were encouraged to dwell there and utter their cries, as of passionate souls lost in too comfortable surroundings.
By one of those freaks of which Nature is so prodigal, Stanley--owner of this native Moreton soil--least of all four Freeland brothers, had the Moreton cast of mind and body.

That was why he made so much more money than the other three put together, and had been able, with the aid of Clara's undoubted genius for rank and station, to restore a strain of Moreton blood to its rightful position among the county families of Worcestershire.

Bluff and without sentiment, he himself set little store by that, smiling up his sleeve--for he was both kindly and prudent--at his wife who had been a Tomson.