Hungry Hill

BOOK FIVE Hal, 1874–1895

THE BEST PART ABOUT ETON, thought Hal, was that they left you alone, You could scrape along through your day, doing a minimum of work, and nobody bothered very much whether you lived or died. There were numberless rules and regulations, of course, and certain hours when you had to be in certain places, but in spite of these things there was a freedom that made for contentment.

He could walk about alone, and no one would ask him what he was doing or where he was going. And he had a room to himself. That, perhaps, was the best of all. One or two of his own pictures hung upon the wall, signed with his initials in the corner, H. E. L.

B. One of the fellows asked who had painted them, and he lied instantly, saying they had been painted by an uncle who had died. Somehow, he did not feel the paintings were good enough to acknowledge as his own. But when he was in the room alone, at night, he would take his candle and look at them closely with secret pride. They were his creation, the things he had made with his hands, and because he had made them himself he loved them. One day he would make paintings which he could show to everyone, but until that day came it was best to conceal what he did, in case people laughed and did not understand.

Mamma had never laughed. She had always understood.

And now that she was not with him any more he wanted his father to take her place, so that whatever he achieved might be an offering to him, a pride and a delight. And he would have the certainty of never failing because his father would have faith in him. The trouble was that he felt shy of his father. They might sit in the drawing-room of the London house together and neither speak a word, father reading the Times, and Hal staring at his boots. And when his father did speak it would be in a jovial, hearty manner, the manner grown-up people so often assumed to boys in the same way that they did to dogs. It was like the way a person patted a dog's coat and said "Good fellow," and then forgot him the moment afterwards. Sometimes his father would say, "Well, Hal, how's the painting?", making an effort to be interested, but because the effort was obvious and the question a hopeless one to answer, Hal would say, "All right, thank you," and then fall once more to silence, feeling gauche and dull.

His father would wait a few minutes, expecting Hal to enlarge upon the subject, and then when nothing happened he would pick up his paper again, or talk about something else to the girls.

The mid-term break, or long leave as they called it, came early in March, and would coincide with his father's return from France. He had been away from England nearly two months.

"Father's coming home tonight," said Molly, who with Miss Frost, and Kitty, and the small Lizette, met Hal at the station, "and he's bringing someone with him, but he won't say who. All very mysterious. Even Miss Frost doesn't know.

I think it's Grannie, but Frostie says it can't be, as father said in his last letter that she was ill."

"Whoever it is must be very important," said Kitty, "because he or she is to have the large room next to father's. I wish it could be Uncle Tom or Aunt Harriet. It's such ages since we saw them last."

"At any rate, I hope the creature won't stay long," said Molly, "as we shall have to make polite conversation at lunch and dinner. Hal, you have grown. You will have to wear tails. And you're thinner than ever."

"It's because I haven't got Frostie to make me swallow apple dumplings," smiled Hal.

"No one at Eton bothers whether you eat."

"Perhaps not, but I don't suppose you hide the dumplings in your mouth and spit them out in the passage afterwards, as you do at home," said Miss Frost.

"You have to behave yourself at Eton."

"Indeed I don't. I do exactly as I please," said Hal.

When they arrived at Lancaster Gate he paid for the cab in lordly fashion, although Miss Frost had the money ready in her purse.

"Nonsense, Frostie," he said. "I'm not a child any longer."

And he shouldered his suit-case and took it upstairs, aware, now that he was back again, that seven weeks at Eton had changed him In some indescribable fashion. He felt older, more responsible, and the girls too looked at him with new eyes, as though he had become someone of importance. They followed him to his room when he unpacked, little Lizette dragging one foot after the other.

He had painted the head of a cat for her, which she seized with shrieks of delight, and there were sketches too for Molly and Kitty, one of his house, and one of the river.

"Have you done anything for father?" asked Molly.

Hal hesitated a moment, and then took a small parcel from the bottom of the suit-case.

"You know the photograph I have of mamma's portrait?" he said The girls nodded.

"Well, I borrowed a magnifying glass from one of the fellows, and I've made a miniature from the head," he said. "Of course, it's not a patch on the original painting, but it's better than nothing."

He unwrapped the paper and handed a small round frame to his sisters.

"I found the frame in a shop in Eton," he said, "and it just fitted." Katherine's face looked upon her daughters; the dark hair, with the low knot in the nape of her neck, the grave, quiet eyes.

"You see," said Hal, "I've often thought how dreadful it must be for father having the portrait at Clonmere, and never seeing it. If he has this it might make up for it in a small way."

The girls considered it in silence.

"It's very good," said Molly; "it's better than the photograph you have."

"Do you really think so?" said Hal. "Will he be pleased?"

"I wish it were mine," said Kitty. "I only have a wretched photograph that I don't like a bit."

"Let me see mamma," said Lizette, and Molly took her on her knee and showed her the miniature.

"It's dreadful that she never knew mamma," said Kitty. "It's like being told about someone in a story that isn't really true. Put it down, Lizette; you mustn't spoil it. Can we show it to Frostie?"

"No," said Hal suddenly, "no, let's shut it up again. I don't know whether I shall give it to father or not."

The miniature, now that he had looked at it again, had become more intimate, more personal, something very precious that he did sot want people to touch.

They all had lunch upstairs in the schoolroom, and in the after noon went to Madame Tussaud's exhibition, going to the Marylebone Road in an omnibus, and returning home in time for tea.

"We'll have tea in the dining-room," said Molly, "and give father a real welcome. It's a nuisance about the visitor, but it can't be helped."

"I think," said Miss Frost, "I will have mine upstairs with nurse and Lizette. Your father will want you to himself."

"Oh, Frostie, you're a coward," laughed Hal, "you don't want to put on company manners before a stranger. Don't be afraid, I'll look after you."

But Miss Frost was firm. And at five o'clock Molly, Hal, and Kitty assembled by themselves in the drawing-room. Hal kept fingering the little parcel in his pocket. He could not make up his mind whether to give it to his father or not. He felt nervous and excited in turn. He wished that he too could be having tea upstairs with Frostie, Lizette, and the nurse. His father would question him about Eton, in front of this visitor, and he knew he would make the wrong sort of answers.

"Here's the brougham," said Kitty, who had been gazing out of the window, "and a cab following as well, simply heaped with trunks. Surely father only took one and his hold-all, when he went to stay with Grannie?"

"They must belong to the visitor," said Molly, looking over her shoulder. "Where on earth shall we put them all? Hal, don't run away. And do try to speak at tea, and don't look as if you have toothache… Father darling."

She flung open the front door and ran down the steps to greet him, followed by Kitty. Hal hung back, his hands in his pockets. He was not sure whether his father would kiss him or not, now that he was at Eton. A smart-looking woman was getting out of the brougham, and shaking hands with the girls. She had a black hat with wings in it. A stranger, no one that they knew. His heart sank a little. Somehow he had hoped that it might have been Uncle Tom from Doon-haven… He came forward slowly, smiling at his father, and without thinking held up his face to be kissed.

"Where are your manners?" said Henry, seizing him by the shoulders, and turning him round. "Don't you know the rule ladies first? This is Hal, Adeline.

You need a hair-cut, old boy. One of you send the servants to deal with this luggage. We both of us want our tea."

They turned and went up the steps, the visitor talking briskly to his father. She seemed to know him very well. Hal made a face at Kitty behind his back. More than ever he wished he was having tea in the schoolroom. There was much talk and bustle and argument about the luggage. The visitor pointed to the things that she wanted upstairs.

"The rest can go in the box-room," she was saying.

"I shan't need the two large trunks, they're full of summer things."

The housemaid, rather red in the face, was bending over a hold-all packed with walking-sticks and umbrellas.

"I'll show you everything after tea," said Henry, "and if there's anything you don't like we'll have it changed. What about you children? Are you having tea upstairs?"

"No," said Molly swiftly, "we've got it in the dining-room, with you. The silver tea-set and everything."

Henry laughed, and glanced across at the visitor.

"Very appropriate welcome," he said. "Come and sit down."

The visitor was glancing at the pictures on the wall in a critical way.

"You didn't tell me you admired the Italian primitives, Henry," she said. "Those languid Madonnas. I can't bear 'em. They always look as if they need a plate of roast beef and a jolly good walk, to put some life into them."

Henry laughed. He seemed to laugh at whatever the visitor said. And to the astonishment of all of them the visitor went and sat in Molly's place at the end of the table, in front of the silver tea-set.

Molly went scarlet, and Hal turned away because it hurt him to see his sister distressed. He knew how she had looked forward to pouring out and playing hostess. He sat down and stared hard at his plate. His father did not seem to notice that anything was wrong, and the visitor began to pour out the tea.

"Well, what have you all been doing?" said Henry. "French, German, dancing classes, music, all the usual things? You wouldn't believe, Adeline, what I spend on these girls' education."

"Let's hope they will make use of it," said the visitor, and turning to Kitty, she asked her a question in French.

Now it was Kitty's turn to be embarrassed.

She flashed a glance of appeal at Molly.

"I'm sorry," she said, "but I don't understand."

The visitor laughed.

"I thought you told me they were fluent," she said to Henry. "I'm afraid you were boasting. Are you going to pass me a scone, Hal, or do you want to eat them all yourself?"

Her eyes were bright and blue, and she smiled, showing white teeth. Hal mumbled an apology, and pushed the plate across the table.

"Dreaming as usual," said his father. "I tell you what it is, Adeline, the boy is studying your face, in order to paint your portrait. I've told you he was the artistic member of the family."

Hal felt the colour mount into his face. It was coming, the conversation he dreaded, baiting him with questions.

"I had a brother who painted as a small boy," said the visitor, "but he forgot all about it when he went to school. You don't have much time for that sort of thing at Eton, do you, Hal?"

"Yes, he does," said Kitty impulsively; "he's done two lovely pictures for Molly and me, and something very special for father."

"Has he, by gosh?" said Henry. "Come on, Hal, what is it?"

"It's nothing," said Hal, "it's not good enough.

I don't think you'd like it."

Nervously he jerked his tea-cup, and the tea spilt over the tablecloth, spreading over the white surface.

"Quick, a plate, Molly," said the visitor, "or it will stain the mahogany. Call one of the servants for a cloth. What a mess! If you want to be an artist, Hal, you'll have to have a steadier hand than that."

Hal stood awkwardly, not knowing what to do, hating her and hating his own clumsiness.

"All right, sit down," said his father impatiently. "Don't stand gaping, like a dazed sheep. Tell me about Eton. Who are your friends?"

"I haven't any," said Hal desperately.

"Oh, come," said Henry, "you must know some of the fellows in the house."

At last Hal admitted that there was someone called Brown he rather liked.

"Brown? What Brown? I don't remember anyone of that name in my time. What does he do?

What are his games?"

"I don't think he does anything."

"Sounds an interesting fellow," said Henry.

"Come on, tell us some more."

The visitor was laughing, and winking at his father across the table. Hal dug his nails into his hands. It was no use. He would not answer any more questions.

"I'm afraid my family are not showing off as well as I hoped," said Henry. "Molly looks sulky, Kitty can't speak a word of French, and my son and heir spills his tea all over the table-cloth and can give no account of his first half at Eton except that he admires a boy named Brown who possesses no accomplishments.

Adeline, I grovel. I take back all I told you in Nice."

The children stared at their plates. This jocular, joking manner of their father's was embarrassing. Why did he have to be so in with this person called Adeline, who stared at each one of them with critical blue eyes, and did not like the Italian pictures on the walls?

Then the door opened, and Lizette came into the room, changed into a white frock for the occasion, her hair tied with two white bows. She was shy. She stood by the door, a finger in her mouth.

"Well, baby, what's wrong? I shan't bite you," said the visitor.

Lizette looked at Kitty. Nobody in the house ever called her baby.

"She generally has a piece of sugar at tea-time," said Molly. "Come here, darling.

Molly will give you one."

The child limped to the table. Hal saw the visitor gaze with curiosity at the heavy foot, in its high boot.

"She ought to do special exercises," she said to Henry. "I knew of someone who was lame from birth, and it worked wonders. But you have to keep at it.

Special exercises, for an hour a day, supervised by a trained expert. I'll find out about it."

Lizette stared at the stranger, as she ate her sugar. She knew her foot was being discussed, and she did not like it.

"Will the lady go soon?" she said to Molly.

Everyone pretended not to hear. Molly bent down and whispered in her ear.

Hal, still staring at his plate, wondered if his father was looking at Lizette in the strange, regretful, half-shamefaced fashion that he sometimes did. Hal knew now that if Lizette had not been born his mother would not have died. But this was something that he did not care to think about. People having children was an uncomfortable subject, especially when it was to do with one's own father, one's own mother…

The visitor was getting up, and pushing back her chair.

"Now what about inspecting the house?" she said briskly.

"Where do you want to start?" smiled Henry.

"The most important place of all, the kitchen," she answered.

Molly hesitated, and glanced at her father.

"I don't think they will have finished tea," she said; "we never do invade the basement at this time of day. I'm afraid Mrs. Lester might not like it."

"Mrs. Lester will have to put up with it," said Henry. "Go ahead, Adeline, you take command from now on. I wash my hands of everything."

He laughed, as though it were a great joke.

"While you are in the kitchen I had better go and pay my respects to Miss Frost and the nurse, and break the news," he added.

He ran up the stairs whistling, and Molly and the visitor disappeared down the hall to the door leading to the basement. Hal and Kitty looked at each other across the dining-room table.

"What does he mean?" said Kitty. "What is he going to tell nurse and Miss Frost?"

"I don't know," said Hal. "It's queer."

"Perhaps we're all going home to Clonmere, and this person is going to take the house from us. That's why she has to be shown all over it, and to see the kitchen. Oh, Hal, how lovely! Do you think it could be so?"

"Perhaps," said Hal, "it might be. Perhaps we're all going back there for Easter, and the Boles are giving it up."

A wild hope surged in the heart of each of them. Kitty ran upstairs after her father. Hal went into the drawing-room. He pulled the miniature out of his pocket and looked at it once again. If they were going home he would be able to compare it with the original at Clonmere. What a fool he must have seemed at tea, jolting the teacup, and talking about that fellow Brown, whom he had gone for a walk with once, on a Sunday. Perhaps if he gave the miniature it would make up for it in some way. His father would know that there was something he could do, and it would show too that he knew his father was often lonely and unhappy without mamma.

He decided to make a secret of it, to put it somewhere where his father would find it at an odd moment.

Hal went over to the desk and wrote on a piece of paper "Father-from his loving son, Hal," and taking the miniature out of his pocket, he wrapped the paper round it, and put it just inside the desk. Then he went and sat down by the fire, and thought about going back home to Clonmere. Kitty must be right. That was the explanation of the whole business and why the Adeline person had brought so many trunks.

Clonmere again, the room in the tower, the horses, the dogs, old Tim, the woods and the creek, Uncle Tom and Aunt Harriet. Life would fall into pattern again, even if mamma could not be with them.

Life would have meaning. He would sail a boat in the creek. He would shoot hares on Doon Island.

He would make a painting of Hungry Hill Kitty came into the room, round-eyed, mysterious.

"Frostie's upset," she said. "What can father have said to her? And she's gone into the spare room to talk to that woman, with her tight-lipped face on, you know, the one she has when she's worried. Surely Frostie would want to go back home."

She broke off, as her father came into the room, followed by Molly, who was white and strained. Henry shut the door. He went and stood over by the fire-place. He too looked anxious.

Perplexed also, as though he did not understand what was the matter with Molly.

"You must be sensible, dear girl," he was saying.

"Why, it's for all your sakes, far more than for my own, that I have done this. Do you think it's been easy for me all these years?"

"We were happy as we were," said Molly, "we don't want anyone else."

She began to cry, like a little girl, not like someone of fifteen. Kitty ran over to her and stood beside her.

Hal said nothing. He stared at his father.

"She's a wonderful woman," Henry said, "so efficient and so intelligent. The trouble is I've let things go to pieces for too long. You've all been allowed to do as you like-the servants, Miss Frost, and all of you. Now your stepmother will take a hand and put everything to rights. If you have any affection for me at all, you will be glad that, this has happened.

You'll soon become fond of her, I know you will.

I can't tell you what she hasn't done for me already."

Stepmother… Hal went on staring at his father.

"You and Kitty were not in the room when I told Moily," said Henry, feeling his son's eyes upon him. "I married Mrs. Price in Nice a fortnight ago. She has been a wonderful friend to me. One day, when you are older, I may tell you all about it. In the meantime I ask you to give her a welcome, and to try to show her some sign of appreciation. Molly seems to have taken it badly, I don't quite know why. It does not mean I love her any the less."

Molly was still crying, biting and twisting the ends of her handkerchief. Her eyes were red and swollen.

"You'd better go upstairs," said Henry in despair. "If Adeline sees you like that she will wonder what on earth is the matter. My God, what a welcome home! I wish to heaven we had stayed out in Nice."

He began pacing up and down the room.

"Will she live here always?" said Kitty. "Is that why she brought all those trunks?"

"Of course she will live with us," said Henry impatiently. "She is Mrs. Brodrick now.

You can call her Adeline."

Molly ran out of the room. Hal could hear her rush up the stairs and slam her bedroom door.

Kitty followed her. Hal felt sick. He did not say anything. He and his father were alone. From the room above came the sound of trunks being dragged across the floor and the low murmur of voices. The little gold clock on the mantelpiece ticked fast and rather shrill.

"It's for your good," repeated Henry, "you must try to realise that. The two girls need a woman of culture and breeding to look after them. Miss Frost is no earthly use. It's not quite the same for you, because you will be at Eton most of the time, but there are always the holidays. Besides, one wants companionship. When you are my age'"

He left the rest of his sentence in the air. What was he doing, appealing to this boy of fourteen for sympathy and understanding; who could not possibly know what he had endured these last years? The unprofitable days, the lonely nights, which now could be blotted out and forgotten.

"It's very hard for a parent," he said, "to be left alone with the responsibility of a young family on his shoulders. It happened to my mother. I believe now that she found it a great burden. Your uncles and I could not understand, naturally, and I have no doubt we were a trial to her."

Still Hal said nothing. He went on staring at his father with blank eyes.

Henry walked over to his desk, and opened it, and began looking through the pile of letters that had accumulated during his absence. He tore them open one by one, scarcely reading the contents. He could hear Adeline's brisk, firm tread in the bedroom above as she unpacked her things. There was a constant coming and going on the stairs as the servants carried up the remainder of the luggage. Suddenly a small package and a piece of paper caught his eye: "Father- from his loving son, Hal." He picked it up, and glanced across at the boy.

"Is this your present?" he said, summoning a smile. "Thank you very much, old fellow."

He began to unwrap the paper.

Hal did nothing. He made no effort to stop him. It was as though he could not move, could not speak.

He stood in the middle of the room like a dumb thing, powerless to help, his heart aching with a strange anguish but imperfectly understood, his mind mocking, bitter, and a black devil whispering, "Go on, open it, open it; damn you."

Henry held the miniature in his hands. The paper wrapping fell to the floor. Hal watched his face, but no change came upon it, save that his lips tightened, making two hard lines at the corners of his mouth. It seemed to Hal that eternity passed as his father looked upon the miniature. The clock went on ticking. A cab passed in the street outside. A piece of coal fell from the fire into the hearth and smouldered there. Then his father spoke, his voice sounding distant," coming from afar.

"It's very good," he said, "very capably done.

Thank you." He opened a little drawer in his desk and put the miniature inside. Then he took a key from the bunch on his chain and locked the drawer. "You had better go up to Molly," he said. "See that she does something to her face before dinner. By the way, Adeline likes it punctually at half-past seven, so you must all be ready and changed five minutes before."

"Yes, father," said Hal.

He waited a moment, but Henry did not meet his eyes. He had turned away, and was staring at the fire. Hal left the room and climbed the stairs to the first floor. The spare bedroom door was open.

There were folds of tissue paper on a chair, and silver brushes on the dressing-table. A strange black evening frock lay on the bed. Someone was drawing the water in his father's bathroom… Hal climbed slowly to the second floor.

It was worse for the girls, of course. They had to suffer and endure the changes, while he was at Eton. Molly and Kitty had to see poor Frostie go, and have that vile Swiss maid take her place. Lizette had five different nurses in nine months, because no one was supposed to treat her foot correctly. Letter after letter would come from Molly, furious and miserable in turn.

"We never see father alone," she would write.

"She sticks to him like glue, and if he gets up and goes out of the room she follows him. And at meal-times she talks all the time through us to him, and looks daggers if Kitty or I try to get in a word. And she's changed all the furniture round in the drawing-room, and had new covers made, which Kitty and I think are hideous, and I'm sure father does too, but he won't say so. He seems unable to cope."

Father, who had always been so magnificent a person, so reliable, so strong, was now, it seemed, a man of no account. The god had fallen from his pedestal. He had no will, no mind of his own.

Whatever Adeline declared in her brisk, downright way, he echoed, not from conviction, but because it was less troublesome. Once only did they come down together to visit Hal at Eton, and the day was a miserable failure. First of all she criticised his room, found fault with his appearance.

"Don't stoop so," she said, "you're positively round-shouldered. Henry, this boy ought to have sat with a backboard for an hour every day. And he's far too pale. He ought to go for a good run.

Why don't you join the beagles?"

"I don't want to," Hal answered.

"In the summer, of course, you'll be made to play cricket. Oh, but you're a wet bob, aren't you? I suppose you chose that because it meant less exertion. Boys are all alike. They need driving."

She spoke always in that bright, aggressive manner which was so characteristic of everything she did, and which made argument impossible. Her blue eyes flitted up and down the walls of his room, seized upon his pictures. Hal could see her mouth twitch in amusement.

"Studying for the Academy, I suppose?" she said. "That tree is a bit out of drawing, isn't it? Not that I'm a judge of these things, but I do know a crooked line when I see one." She laughed over her shoulder at Henry. "If that's what your old Clonmere looks like, I'm not surprised you let it," she said. "I'll be bound it was damp too, with all that water so close. Well, Hal, what else have you got to show us?"

"Nothing," he said, "nothing at all."

"Not very prolific, are you? You'll never make your fortune. What about some lunch in Windsor?

I'm starving."

And throughout the day it was the same; mocking, teasing, contrasting his lanky, overgrown figure with that of other boys of his own age.

"You seem to lack ambition," she said, "you have no interest in anything. Wouldn't you like to be Captain of the Cricket Eleven one day, or head of Pop, or whatever they call it?"

"Not particularly," said Hal.

"It's no use, Adeline," said his father. "I'm fated to have a son who is totally undistinguished.

It's a pity, but there it is."

He spoke lightly, shrugging his shoulders, but his words stung'

"Your uncle Herbert has asked you all to Lletharrog in the summer," he said. "Adeline and I will probably go abroad."

He did not kiss him. The train steamed away, and Hal was left with the sovereign in his hand. They never came again.

Holidays at Lletharrog or at Saunby became a method of escape. The girls were so pathetically glad to get away from Lancaster Gate. Now that Great-aunt Eliza was dead the house at Saunby belonged to Uncle Herbert too. His family would move there from Lletharrog "during the summer months.

"I wish we could stay with you always," said Kitty.

"I never want to go back to Lancaster Gate again."

"Why, nonsense," smiled Uncle Herbert.

"I know how fond you are of your father."

"It's different now," said Kitty.

Uncle Herbert did not say anything. But later, when the girls and their brother were walking on the sands, Kitty said: "I heard Uncle Herbert call Adeline that "damn woman" to Aunt Cathie. They were in the study, and the door was open. I heard him say the whole thing was a tragedy. Fancy him saying damn, and he's a clergyman."

"No one likes her," said Molly fiercely.

"If only I had the courage I'd run away and be a governess. She told father that poor little lizette was sly, and that all crippled children had something wrong mentally. Lizette, who is so clever and sweet. It's queer, she dislikes Clonmere, although she has never been there. She's even taken down the picture of it that used to hang in the drawing-room. And whenever anyone talks about the country she makes a laughing, sarcastic remark."

"Just think," said Kitty. "Father has only gone across three times since mamma died, and then he stayed in a hotel in Slane and did his business from there. And when we lived at Clonmere he used to drive up to the mines every day. I don't understand how the mines go on without him."

"A running concern doesn't need the proprietor's supervision," said Hal. "There's a chap at my tutor's whose father owns a coal mine, and he's never even seen the place. He just sits at home and rakes in the dividends. There's no point in working if you can get money for doing nothing."

"Mamma would have hated to hear you say that, Hal," said Molly. "It goes against all she used to teach us."

"I dare say it does," answered Hal, "but what's the use? No one ever talks to us in the way she did. And the fellows at Eton would think I was pi or a fool if I tried to keep it up. If we'd all been living at home at Clonmere it would be different. I dare say father and I would have gone up to the mines together, and I should have had a feeling for them, as though they were all bound up with the family. Now I don't care twopence. And anyway, there will always be loads of money coming from them, that's the main thing. I shall do myself well when I go up to Oxford, I don't mind telling you."

"Don't forget what Uncle Herbert was telling us the other day about the copper trade falling to bits.

Several mines in Cornwall have been closed," said Molly.

"Yes, but he also said the more enterprising ones had discovered tin beneath the copper, and would be able to work the tin instead. The price of tin is very high, and the proprietors can go on making fortunes over that."

"It may not be the same at home," said Molly. "Perhaps there isn't any tin on Hungry Hill."

"Tin or copper, what does it matter," said Kitty, "if all the benefit we get from the stuff is living in Lancaster Gate with Adeline, and a Swiss maid spying on us all the time, and father washing his hands of us? I'd rather be poverty-stricken and live in a cabin on the Kileen moors."

"Lancaster Gate and London would be all right if it wasn't for Adeline," said Molly. "We were happy enough when we were alone with father."

"No, we were not," said Hal. "None of us has ever been really happy since we left Clonmere, and you know it. Nothing has been the same since mamma died, and never will be."

His sisters stared at him. He looked white and strained, and there were tears in his eyes.

"Oh, what's the use of anything?" he said.

"Sometimes I wish I was dead."

And he ran away from them across the Saunby sands, the dogs leaping and barking at his heels, the wind blowing his hair across his face.

"He's got to the difficult stage," said Molly; "boys always get like that. Aunt Cathie said Bob used to be the same."

"Bob had a home to go to," said Kitty.

"Hal only has Lancaster Gate."

The problem of the holidays became more acute as the years passed. Henry's second wife made no secret of the fact that she disliked her stepchildren. There was no question of sharing Henry with his children. She wanted him for herself, and the only way to accomplish this was little by little to wean him from them, make him believe that they cared nothing for him, that none of his friends or relatives was worthy of him, and that she alone understood his needs, his comforts. She had rescued him from a life of wretched loneliness, and now he must cling to her only for consolation.

It was exciting, at first, to be wanted with so much passion. It was a novelty to Henry, who took full advantage of it, thinking he could atone thus for the wasted years. He was roused and flattered. It was pleasing to know that Adeline adored him, and while she adored him she was also able to take all responsibilities upon her shoulders, run his house with efficiency, deal with his children, tell him all the things that he wanted to know, and keep from him what was better ignored. Marriage with Adeline made life easy, he said to himself, made life comfortable and soothing. If Molly and Kitty and Hal were difficult it was their fault, they should be more adaptable. Anyway, they must go their own way. He did not want to be worried about them. Adeline was right, they were an ungrateful trio, thinking only of themselves. They did not realise what he had been through.

They did not understand that a man needed a wife in his home, otherwise he went to pieces. If the children did not get on with Adeline then they must go somewhere else for their holidays, to Herbert or to Edward.

They had nothing to complain of, because he always insisted that they should have the best of everything. When it was a question of Molly coming out, parties were arranged and dinners given, and Edward and his wife came to London to take her about. Adeline refused, quite rightly too, when Molly had always shown her so little affection.

Henry took Molly out once or twice, but somehow when he did it seemed to make trouble with Adeline afterwards.

"I wish you would come too," said Henry.

"Molly really did look very charming at the ball the Goschens gave."

"No doubt she did, because I wasn't there," laughed Adeline. "Miss Molly likes to have all the attention, and always did. I remember the time she used to make eyes at the music-master."

"Oh, come '?

"My dear Henry, I'm not blind. Well, I suppose you are going out again tonight? You prefer your daughter's company to your wife's."

"Of course I don't. If you'd rather I stayed…"

"It's not a question of what I'd rather. You know I never think about myself. No, if you enjoy spending a heated evening in a ballroom watching your eldest daughter doing her best to snaffle? husband, you're welcome. Personally, I shall go to bed early.

I've had a wretched head all day."

"Well then, I will stay. Edward can take Molly. I don't want to go."

After two or three similar episodes it was simpler to leave Molly in Edward's hands altogether.

The next difficulty was when Hal wrote asking Henry to come down on the fourth of June. He was rowing stroke in one of the senior boats, and he wanted his father there on the occasion.

"Please come alone," he said, "or bring Molly and Kitty with you."

Henry feared that this would go badly with Adeline, and tried to hide the letter from her on the breakfast-table.

Her sharp eyes caught sight of the Eton post-mark and Hal's writing.

"Well, what's your son got to say for himself?" she said. "Been get-ting into trouble with the authorities?"

"He wonders if I'd take the girls down for the fourth. He's stroking one of the boats."

"Doesn't ask me, I suppose."

"No, not actually. But I'm sure he'd be delighted to see you."

"My dear, don't pretend to me, I can't stand it. I wouldn't go to Eton if I was asked. As a matter of fact I'd arranged luncheon here with the Armitages and the Masons. I'd no idea you would want to go streaking off to Eton. It's going to be very awkward having to entertain them on my own. After all, they are your friends. But don't let me spoil your plans, please. I don't know why Hal should suddenly express a wish to have you down. I suppose he wants someone to show off before, as rowing seems to be his one accomplishment, besides drinking."

"What the devil do you mean?"

"Oh, I'm sorry. I forget you didn't see the photograph he sent Kitty. I happened to see it on her dressing-table. He and some other boy had a bet, it appears, as to who could drink down the most beer, out of a monster tankard. Your son distinguished himself by winning, and had his photograph taken doing it. Of course I always have thought him the image of that photograph of your brother Johnnie, but never liked to say so. You'll have to watch out. That sort of thing is hereditary, you know."

She laughed, and got up from the breakfast table. "Poor dear! what it is to be a parent," she said. "At least I spare you most of it. I'm taking Lizette to the masseuse this morning, and fetching Kitty from the dancing-class this afternoon. If I were you I should write to Hal and congratulate him on his capacity for strong ale."

She swept out of the room for her morning sa^cance with the cook.

Henry did not answer. He collected his letters and went into the smoking-room. Hal like Johnnie…

. No one had ever seen a likeness between them. Or had they? And refrained from saying so because they had regard for his feelings? Adeline was so often right in her judgement, shrewd and clear-sighted. That sort of thing was hereditary. Johnnie, and old Grandfather Simon Flower. '

"My dear Hal, I am sorry I shan't be able to get down for the fourth, but we have a luncheon arranged here for that day. I shall ask your uncle Edward to go down instead, and no doubt Molly and Kitty will wish to accompany him. '?

Hal shrugged his shoulders when he read the letter, and tearing it across, threw it in his waste-paper basket.

The woman had prevented him, of course; he knew how it would be. All right, what the hell? If his father did not want to see him row there was an end to it.

Rowing happened to be the one thing he could do decently, and he had hoped, secretly, that his father would be proud of the fact. Apparently not. It did not interest him.

His last half at Eton, and his father had come down to see him once in four years. The same thing would happen at Oxford. An occasional letter, a fat cheque, and nothing else. Well, he was used to it by now. It did not matter any more.

It was during Hal's second year at Oxford that Molly, on a visit to the Eyres across the water, met and became engaged to Robert O'Brien Spencer, J. p., a friend of her uncle Bill's.

"He is such a dear," she wrote to Hal, "and loves every inch of the country, just as I do. And don't think I am doing this to get away from Adeline, because it isn't true, whatever she may say to father. I am really fond of Robert. But the glorious thing is this, we shall live only thirty or forty miles away from Clonmere, and Robert is going to write and ask father if we may go there for Christmas, home I mean, and give the darling place an airing. Of course you must join us, and Kitty, and Lizette."

Home, after ten years. And dear old Molly going and getting herself engaged, to one of her own countrymen into the bargain. It was the greatest excitement since he had been up at Oxford-even better than rowing against Cambridge last spring. He must hold a celebration, give a dinner-party to all his friends and get gloriously tight. His allowance was running through his hands like water through a sieve, but it did not matter a damn. The old mines could stand the racket And he would paint Molly's portrait and present it to the happy bridegroom with compliments. Home for Christmas…

Molly was married in November, and there was a glorious gathering of the clans that even Adeline could not squash. She arranged the ceremony, of course, and did her best to damp the proceedings by insisting that the house in Lancaster Gate was too small for the reception, and it must be held in a hotel, that was big and dreary and lacked all personality. But she could not take away the radiant look on Molly's face as she stood receiving her guests in the centre of the room, and she could not stop the whispered admiration for Kitty, the chief bridesmaid, who at seventeen had lost her coltish look and was strikingly lovely, like her mother before her. And though she did all she could to prevent it, she could not drag Henry away before the stalwart bridegroom had persuaded him to allow his family the occupation of Clonmere for Christmas.

"We've won," said Hal gleefully, rubbing his hands, "we've trounced her at last. Don't look so scared, Lizette, she can't hear me. And I don't care if she does. Kitty and I are going to take you back home, over the water."

They set forth on the sixteenth of December, crossing to Slane and going down by train to Mundy, where they found that the little paddle-steamer was still running in spite of the lateness of the season, and it took them across the twenty miles of bay to Doonhaven itself.

The ten-year-old Lizette stood by the rail, between her sister and brother, looking upon it all for the first time, her pinched face losing its haunted expression, and the colour coming into her cheeks. The breeze was soft, from the south-west, the sky was full of little fleecy clouds, and the hills were green under the sun.

"There's Andriff Castle, where Grannie was born," said Hal, pointing to the far distance. "We have cousins there, I expect Molly will ask them over.

They must be grown up by now, and you see that church, standing in shadow, down by the water's edge-that's Ardmore, where we used to go every Sunday. Mamma is buried there."

How tiny it looked. How windswept and alone.

Had she lain there all these ten years, with no one belonging to her? Did anyone put flowers on her grave? Hal felt his throat tighten. The past seemed so remote, so long ago.

There was Hungry Hill, lifting his old granite head to the sky, and the mine-workings at the base, the chimney-stacks, the sheds, the tracks, and as the steamer rounded the point the humped back of Doon Island lay before them, the long line of garrison buildings, and the village of Doonhaven, nestling in the shadow of the hills.

"Look there, at the head of the creek across the harbour-that's Clonmere," said Hal.

They stared in silence, at the home they had deserted as little children. The sun shone in the windows and upon the grey walls. The new wing had mellowed with the years and had become part of it all, but it was still empty, untouched since the builders had left it in 1871. A flag was flying from the old tower. Boats were anchored in the creek.

The tears were running down Kitty's cheeks.

"I know it's idiotic, but I can't help it," she said, smiling at Hal. "I thought somehow it would be different, but it's not. It's just the same."

"There's a fellow in one of the boats," said Hal. "I wonder if it's a Sullivan or a Baird? He's probably been after killigs."

"The herons still live in the trees below the park," said Kitty. "Look, Lizette, by the other creek, you can see their big, untidy nests…

There's the harbour wall. It's low tide, the harbour is dry. We shall have to anchor outside and pull ashore."

"I see Molly and Robert on the quay," said Lizette, "and other people with them. The man is dressed as a clergyman. He has a long grey beard."

"It's Uncle Tom," shouted Hal. "He used to be father's best friend. And look, there's Aunt Harriet; she's waving a handkerchief."

"That must be Jinny with them," said Kitty. "Good heavens, she was six when we left. And now I suppose she's sixteen."

The paddle-steamer thrashed the water and went astern.

The anchor plunged from the bows. And across the dancing water the little boats pulled. Everyone was smiling, and kissing, and shaking hands. Uncle Tom had one hand on Hal's shoulder and the other on Kitty's.

Aunt Harriet had picked Lizette up in her arms and was holding her tight. Jinny looked from one to the other with warm brown eyes.

"God bless you all," said Uncle Tom, in his deep voice. "We are so very glad to welcome you home, so thankful and so happy."

The familiar cobbled stones, the shingle beach, the boats drawn up above the tide. Old Murphy's shop, the chandler's at the corner, the public-house across the square. It was market-day, and the stalls were being put away. A cowman was driving the cattle up the hill. Men stood about the square with straws in their mouths, staring and doing nothing, as they had always done. A woman was scolding a neighbour from her doorway, and a little slatternly child ran out with his finger in his mouth. The priest stood on the step of Murphy's shop, with a cabbage under his arm. Some half-dozen miners, in their working clothes, came singing down the road from Hungry Hill.

"Why did we ever leave?" said Hal. "Why did father make us go away?" Uncle Tom smiled, and took his arm.

"Never mind about that," he said. "You're home once more." How good it was to see Uncle Tom again, and kiss Aunt Harriet's plump cheek; smell the familiar Rectory smell, of leather chairs, and ferns, and dogs; sit down to an enormous tea, and a fruit cake of Aunt Harriet's own baking.

And memories, happy ones, tumbling over each other.

"Do you still churn the butter, Aunt Harriet, and skim the cream off with a scallop shell?"

"Does Uncle Tom still ride out to Ardmore on Sundays?"

"Do you remember how we played charades after tea, and mamma pretended she could not guess the word, and knew all the time?"

"Have you forgotten the picnic on Kileen moors, and Kitty falling into the bog?"

"And the expedition to the Bule Rock?"

"And the party the garrison gave on Doon Island?" The years in London were as though they had never been. Eton and Oxford existed no longer. Adeline and Lancaster Gate were an evil dream.

Molly had remembered his wish for the tower room, and Hal looked around it that first evening home, his heart too full to speak. The Boles had never used the room, and a damp, unlived-in smell still clung about the walls. The pictures were faded, and some of them green with mould. On the top of an old cupboard was a case of birds' eggs, thick with dust. He had forgotten whom they belonged to. Was it his grandfather, who had won the silver cup for greyhounds? He took them down and cleared away the dust. There were bits and pieces of an old fishing-rod too. Too broken to be of any use.

He was glad the Boles had done nothing with this room. It was intimate, personal, belonging only to the family. Home was the same, unchanged, but a little shabbier, a little more worn. Some of the carpets were threadbare. The curtains in the dining-room were falling to bits. The servants that Molly had brought with her from Robert's home said that the kitchen range was almost useless, and the pump in the stable-yard was broken.

"But what does it matter?" said Molly at dinner. "We're home again, and if the turkey has to be roasted in front of the dining-room fire on Christmas Day it will taste all the better for it."

Once more the lapping of water in the creek.

Once more the full moon over Hungry Hill.

There was so much to see, so much to do, and all in a little space of time. It was queer to see none of the old horses in the stables, and the coach-house was empty because the carriage had been sent away to London many years before. Old Tim was dead. The groom that Robert had brought with him lived in Tim's old quarters over the stables. Some of the windows were broken, there was grass growing between the cobbles.

"And it used to be kept so beautifully," sighed Molly to her husband. "I remember the boy washing down the yard every morning, before the horses were groomed, and then Tim bringing the carriage round to the front door, if mamma wanted to go down into Doon-haven. Even if the Boles did not bother about the upkeep, you would think the agent would have seen everything was in order."

"Always the same story when the owner goes away," said Robert. "You can't really blame the agent, or anyone. They feel no interest is taken. What's the use, they think, in looking after a place when the man it belongs to doesn't come near it for ten years?

Never mind, Molly, we'll try to get it into-some sort of shape while we are here."

Hal and his sister went up to visit the cottages at Oakmount, and they came away silent and disheartened, because after the first flood of conversation they felt tongue-tied and out of place.

"Ah, you're the image of your mother," said Tim's widow to Kitty. "The same sweet eyes, God rest her soul." She ran on in this way for several minutes, making them feel welcomed and remembered, but then she started to bewail the times, the hardness of living, her only son and daughter both gone to America, her eyes fixed all the while on Hal.

He gave her all the loose change in his pocket, which she seized greedily, and when they had said goodbye Hal looked over his shoulder and saw her muttering to herself, her face wrinkled, different, and he knew that she had forgotten them already, his mother's memory was a trick to please them; all that mattered to Tim's widow was the loose change in her hands.

They went down to the Rectory, where Uncle Tom and Aunt Harriet soon restored them to cheerfulness.

"Ten years is a long time," said Uncle Tom, "but you must not worry about it. You've come back, and you are going to stay. What do you intend to do with yourself, Hal, when you leave Oxford?"

"Nothing," smiled Hal, "except enjoy myself and paint pictures for my friends."

Aunt Harriet shook her head.

"You've been learning bad ways, I can see that," she said. "Too much money and too little leadership. Come and help me churn the butter.

Jinny will show you how to do it."

The white-scrubbed dairy, and Aunt Harriet bustling with the pots and pans.

"Come and work for your living," she said, "instead of lounging there on the table, drinking buttermilk.

Jinny has twice your energy, for all your size."

"Women shall work, and men shall play," teased Hal, pulling Jinny's hair. "Do you remember when I tipped you out of a wheelbarrow, Jinny, and made you cry?"

"Yes, but you kissed her afterwards and said you were sorry," said Aunt Harriet.

Hal dug his finger in the bowl of yellow cream, and looked slyly at Jinny, who, with sleeves rolled up and hair pinned on top of her head, was working the handle of the churn.

"I suppose you're too old to kiss now, Jinny," he said.

"Much too old," said Jinny gravely.

"And too sensible to fall out of a wheelbarrow?"

"It depends who was wheeling it."

"Would you like me to take you round the garden and see?"

"I would not."

"Then we'll go fishing in the creek instead, if you'll be good enough to trust yourself to me."

"I won't promise anything," said Jinny, "until you take your fingers out of the cream."

Hal laughed, and slipping off the table, he took his place beside her and worked the handle of the churn.

"Oh, Jinny," he said, "you've never been away, so you don't know what it is to be home again."

It was no use getting depressed because the years had come between them and the people of Clonmere. The place had not changed. And every moment must be enjoyed. It was a truly happy Christmas. The kitchen range was coaxed into cooking the turkey, and Hal, as master of the house, was persuaded to carve it, which he did in such generous fashion that nothing remained at the end for himself but the carcase. It was a great party, with the Brodricks, the Spencers, the Callaghans, and the Flower cousins from Andriff, Simon and Judith and Frank, and after the Christmas dinner had been eaten they all played hide-and-seek in the new wing, the empty rooms echoing with running feet, and calls, and laughter. Tom Callaghan stood with his wife in the passage leading to the new wing from the old house, listening to the thumps, and bangs, and shouts of triumph.

"What a tragedy!" he said softly. "And it might have been thus all these years. The rooms furnished, instead of bare. The girls and that boy growing up where they belonged. And Henry his old dear, generous self."

"Will he ever come back, do you think?" asked Harriet.

The Rector shook his head.

"You've seen his letters," he said, "you can understand what has happened to him. He's a different man."

"Hal's so like him," said his wife, "the same charm, the same smile, and yet something lacking, not the enthusiasm, not the drive that Henry had. And he sometimes talks so bitterly for a boy not twenty-one."

"Ten years' neglect, and all his mother's teaching thrown away," said Tom. "If Henry would break down the barrier that has grown up between them… but even then, I wonder. The foundations have been knocked away."

Kitty ran down the stairs of the great hall, pursued by her cousin Simon Flower. Lizette, her thin face flushed for once, tip-toed into the drawing-room that had never been used. Laughter came from the gallery above, where Robert had caught Molly, and the two waltzed to the head of the stairs.

In the little boudoir above the barred front door Hal struggled with the windows to the balcony. They were rusted and damp, and would not open.

"This was to have been my mother's room," he said.

"Father planned it for her, next to the bedroom. Do you like it?"

Jinny nodded.

"I've often looked at it from outside," she said. "I used to trespass here, you know, when the Boles were away. It's just as I imagined. In the corner there your mother would have had her writing-table, close to the fire. And there would have been a chair here, and another there."

She smiled at Hal, her eyes warm with understanding.

"Do you remember her?" he said.

Jinny shook her head.

"Only just that there was someone with a very soft voice and dark hair, who used to kiss me when I came to tea," she said.

Hal stared in front of him, his hands in his pockets.

"I know," he said. "The terrible thing is that I can't remember more than that either. And yet she was the person I loved best in the world." Once again he struggled with the windows, but the damp had too great a hold on them. "I can't open them," he said, "they're shut for ever." He turned away, shrugging his shoulders. "Let them stay, then," he said. "No one will ever live in this part of the house now."

She followed him along the gallery to the stairs.

The hide-and-seekers had taken themselves off to the old house. The great hall was deserted.

"It's queer," said Hal, "but as a rule you hear of the haunting of old buildings, never new. And yet I feel this wing is full of ghosts."

Jinny put out her hand to him.

"You would not mind if it was your mother, would you, Hal?" she said.

She looked young, and brave, and very confident. She was not too shy to hold his hand there, alone, in the silence.

Hal shook his head.

"It's not my mother who's the ghost," he said, "that's what makes it so queer. It's the ghost of my father still alive, hiding here in the shadows." He looked over his shoulder at the black, gaping doors. "Come away, Jinny," he said. "I don't want to think about him, I want to think about ourselves. It's Christmas, and we've got to be happy, we've got to be gay…?

When the party at Clonmere broke up at the end of January, Molly and her husband took Lizette off to live with them in the neighbouring county, and Kitty went to stay with her cousins the Flowers at Castle Andriff. Only Hal returned across the water, proposing to spend a night in Lancaster Gate before going back to Oxford.

"Always remember," said Uncle Tom, as he shook hands with him on the quay at Doonhaven, "that there is a home for you at the Rectory-not for your dear mother's sake, or for your father's, but for your own.

We are all very fond of you. Jinny is going to miss your companionship."

"Thank you," said Hal, "I shan't forget."

There was a great sadness in his heart as the steamer drew away from the harbour into Mundy Bay, and Clonmere, and the village, and Doon Island became once more grey shadows under the hills. The holiday that had meant so much belonged already to the past.

He wondered whether he would ever return, and had a wretched feeling of despair that this was farewell.

When he arrived at Lancaster Gate he found that his father and stepmother were out. He sat alone in the drawing-room, turning over magazines. It seemed to him that the room was full of Adeline. Her books, her knitting, her writing-paper. Everything neat and in order-but somehow lacking comfort, and he sat there in anticipation of her brisk, firm tread, her grating laugh. His old schoolboy dread of conversation engulfed him, and to steady his nerves he went into the dining-room and helped himself to a large whisky-and-soda. It was the only way to get through the evening. Never once had he felt the need of one at Doonhaven. It was only here, in the cold, impersonal atmosphere of Lancaster Gate, that he could not do without it. By the time his father and stepmother arrived he was warm and hazy with false courage.

Life did not seem so formidable, and he felt he could stand up against the world.

"I suppose," said Adeline before dinner, "Clonmere was fit for a pigsty, and you picnicked in the dirt without any qualms?"

"On the contrary," said Hal, "Molly fed us like fighting cocks. And no one could go short with Uncle Tom and Aunt Harriet at the Rectory."

"Is that the Rector whose wife spends all her time in the kitchen?" said Adeline. "I gather he's your only neighbour for miles. How your father ever stood the life beats me."

"The Callaghans are the kindest people I've ever known," said Hal. "Uncle Tom and my father were always together in the old days."

"Faute de mieux," laughed Adeline. "I don't think he would find a great deal in common nowadays with a stuffy old parson living at the back of beyond. If it was not for the entail he would sell the place tomorrow. He's told me so, scores of times."

Henry came into the room, and dinner was announced a few minutes later.

Hal ate in silence, burning with indignation.

What a liar the woman was, talking light-heartedly about his father selling Clonmere!

He would never do such a thing. But during dinner Adeline talked through him all the time, kept making allusions to the absurd expense of hanging on to places that brought no benefit to anybody, and were only a drag on capital. Never once did she mention Clonmere by name. She talked of friends of hers in the north of England who, she said, had been saddled with an empty house and a derelict estate for years, and had just got rid of it.

"They sold the land at a wonderful price for building," she said, "and are thankful to be quit of it. Now they intend spending most of their time abroad, I believe. Of course there were no children, and there was none of that absurd entail business."

It was not until she had left the room after dessert that Henry began to ask questions about Doonhaven and Clonmere. His manner was off-hand and indifferent, but beneath it lay an anxiety, a strange desire to hear and to know, which he wished to conceal. How were the Callaghans, he asked? Was old Tom much changed, much older? Had the Boles taken care of the grounds, or was everything becoming overgrown?

Was the agent civil? Did Hal hear any talk about the change-over to tin in the mines, and the prospects for the future?

"I understand there is plenty of tin there," he told his father, "but it's easier to work than copper, and not so much labour is needed. Uncle Tom told me that several of the miners had been turned away.

They don't understand it, when they've been working there for years."

"They'll have to put up with it," said Henry.

"I suppose so, but Uncle Tom says it's hard for them, to have their livelihood snatched away suddenly, almost overnight. There was a lot of distress last winter. Many of the younger men are talking of emigrating, and several have gone to America already."

"That doesn't concern me. The ones whom I keep employed I take good care to pay well.

I shall continue to do so, as long as the price of tin makes it worth my while to work the mines."

"And after that, what?"

Henry shrugged his shoulders.

"Close them down, or sell them beforehand, at the psychological moment," he said, "whichever strikes me as the wisest thing to do at the time."

"Uncle Tom said you would do that," said Hal.

"I think he was rather uneasy about it. He said so many people would be thrown out of work."

"Tom's a parson, it's his job to think about those things," said Henry. "I don't see that it need concern us. I have a right to do what I like with my own property, and the mines belong to me."

Hal said nothing. It was not his affair. He remembered suddenly the visit to his mother's grave at Ardmore, the day before he left. He had driven out in the Rector's trap, and taken Jinny with him. The grave was tidy and well-kept, and bulbs were planted round it Her father and mother always saw to it, said Jinny; daffodils came every year in spring.

They stood there together, and Jinny swept away the fallen leaves. They read the inscription.

"Katherine-beloved wife of Henry Brodrick."

Should he tell his father about the visit to the grave? But his father asked nothing. He never spoke of Ardmore.

He did not once talk about the empty new wing at Clonmere.

"So Kitty and Lizette have decided to stay out there with Molly?" he said. "They evidently prefer her company to mine."

"I think they would return if they believed you wanted them," said Hal.

Henry did not answer. He was fingering the stem of his glass.

"I suppose," he said, "you would have a great objection to breaking the entail?"

Hal stared at him.

"What do you mean?" he said.

"Your great-grandfather made a long and very detailed will," said Henry. "I have to have my heir's permission to sell the place. It's something I can't do on my own. If you agree, naturally I shall make it up to you when you come of age in a few months' time, and you would have a considerable allowance to live upon. Judging by the rate at which you live up at Oxford, you are going to need it too."

Hal flushed.

"I'm sorry, father," he said, "but I can't do it. I don't think you quite understand what Clonmere means to me, and to Molly, and Kitty. We belong over there. It's home to us, whatever you may feel."

"You haven't lived there since you were children," said Henry. "I don't count this Christmas visit, that was only a picnic. Adeline is always saying that it's ridiculous, hanging on to the place, paying out vast sums in wages and repairs and one thing after another, and she's perfectly right. The property is a drain on my income, and gives nothing in return."

"The gospel according to Saint Adeline," said Hal bitterly.

"No need to be impertinent," said Henry. "Your stepmother is a very far-seeing woman, and she talks sound sense. What use is Clonmere to me?

Answer me if you can. I haven't been there for ten years."

"That's your fault, isn't it?" said Hal. "The place is there, waiting for you. Just the same, only a little shabbier. You loved it once. You love it still.

But you won't go near it because you are afraid."

"What do you mean, afraid?"

"Oh, don't worry. It's not my mother. She won't haunt you. She forgave you long ago. She told me that when I visited her grave, which I suppose you've never seen. You're afraid of yourself, of the man you used to be. You're afraid, if you returned, that he would come out of the shadows and haunt you. That's why you want to sell it, so that he can be buried, once and forever."

Hal rose to his feet, white and trembling.

The words had tumbled from him, he scarcely knew what he was saying.

"You've been drinking," said Henry slowly. "I suspected it whet we came in to dinner. And it's not the first time either.

Adeline warned me about this. She says it's become a habit with you; she has ways and means of finding out, when you are here. She has seen you creep in here to the sideboard and help yourself, when you think nobody is about."

"And if I do," said Hal, "what's the reason?

Because I can't face sitting here at dinner between you both, knowing that every day and every night you become more hopeless, more miserable, more utterly dependent upon her for every damned thing. Molly, and Kitty, and I, and poor Lizette mean nothing to you, absolutely nothing. And now she's trying to get you to sell Clonmere. Thank God I can prevent it. I won't break the entail, not if you give me ten thousand quid…?

He broke off excitedly, as Adeline came into the room.

"What on earth is the matter?" she said. "I could hear Hal shouting from the drawing-room. Do you want to call the servants up from the basement?"

"Call the whole world, I don't care," said Hal, "but I'd like you to know you've made a mistake, for once. I'm not going to be bribed into selling my home to please you."

"Leave the room, and go to bed," said Henry curtly. "In the morning you may be able to talk clearly."

"He may," said Adeline, "if he doesn't get down to the whisky decanter first." She pointed scornfully at his trembling hands. "Look at him," she said. "I hope you're proud of your son.

A month in that country of yours has done well for him, hasn't it? He can scarcely stand up. He could let himself go over there, and revert to type. Now you can see him at last, Henry, as he really is.

And perhaps, since we've got down to it at last, you would like to have a look at some of the bills that have come in for him while he's been away. Oxford tradesmen don't wait for ever, any more than anyone else.

Most illuminating, they are, I can tell you.

How's this one for a start? Fifty quid for wine, all supplied to the young gentleman last term." She threw the bill on to the table. "And here's another, and another, a whole sheaf of them to keep you busy all tomorrow morning, if you feel that way inclined. And lastly a very pretty little statement from your bank, Master Hal, in which the manager wishes to acquaint you with the fact that you are overdrawn to the sum of two hundred pounds."

Hal saw the two faces. His father's a mask, cold and indifferent, and his stepmother's flushed in triumph.

"How dare you open my letters?" he said. "How dare you?"

"My dear Hal, don't be so theatrical. The initials being the same as your father's, of course I opened them, thinking they were his. And here is a billet-doux from across the water, that came by this evening's post. A thousand apologies for having glanced into it. The writing looks like a kitchen-maid's, and whoever it is signs herself Jinny."

She laughed, holding the letter in front of him.

Hal struck out at her, in a blind fury of rage, his blow catching the side of her mouth. She staggered back, her hands to her face, the blood coming from her cut lip in a slow trickle. In a moment Henry was upon Hal, seizing him by his collar, thrusting him against the table.

"You damned drunken young fool," he said, "have you gone mad?"

Hal shook him off, and stood staring at his father, white and shaken.

"Good God, you may well look ashamed of yourself," said Henry, "striking a woman, the lowest thing a man can do. Here's my handkerchief, Adeline; you had better go up to your room and call Marcelle to you. But first this boy is going to apologise to you."

"I am not," said Hal.

Henry looked at his son. Hal was pale and dishevelled. The bills lay scattered on the floor. Jinny's letter had been kicked under the table, and lay crumpled and forgotten.

"Either you apologise to Adeline or you get out of my house," said Henry. His eyes were hard and cold and without mercy. "You've always been a trial and an anxiety," he said, "ever since you were born. Your mother spoilt you absurdly, and you've thought yourself God Almighty ever since. In three months' time you will be twenty-one, and so far you've distinguished yourself only by drinking too much, wasting my money, and painting bad pictures. You don't think I'm proud of you, do you?"

Hal walked slowly from the dining-room into the hall. Adeline said nothing. She watched them both, the handkerchief still to her lips.

"Remember," said Henry, "I mean what I say. Either you apologise to Adeline, or you leave this house, finally and for ever."

Hal did not answer. He did not look back over his shoulder. He opened the front door and stood for a moment gazing down into the street. Then he went out hatless in the rain.

Jinny Callaghan decided to have a clearance on her twenty-fifth birthday. Too many things had accumulated in her bedroom at the Rectory. There were her school books, for one thing, which would be of far more use to the priest in Doonhaven, if he liked to have them, than they could be to her. She would take them down the following morning and risk a snubbing. A present from a heretic, bound with red ribbon. At any rate, it would make father and mother laugh. The sentimental love stories of adolescence she would keep for her goddaughter, Molly's child, against the day when she would be old enough to read them. Also her work-basket, her first, given her by her mother when she was ten years old. It was fun to sit down on the floor, with her legs tucked under her skirt, and find the old treasures. Here were the photographs.

She could not bring herself to throw them away. Father in his university days, with a group of friends. He looked very dear and wicked, as he probably was. Mr.

Brodrick stood by his side, and Mr.

Brodrick's brother Herbert, who also became a clergyman, and sometimes wrote to her father. They all looked very merry. Here was one of herself as a baby, sitting on her mother's knee in a white starched frock. What a little fright, with round eyes like boot-buttons! A picnic-group taken at Glen Begh, with themselves and all the Brodricks as children. Molly had not changed at all, she was still the same laughing, happy person today that she had been at ten years old. But no one would have thought Kitty, the ugly duckling, would have grown into a beauty. Jinny looked for the wedding-group, taken two years ago, of Kitty Brodrick's marriage to her cousin, Simon Flower. They were standing on the steps at Castle Andriff. Kitty was really lovely, and she herself as a bridesmaid seemed such a dowd in comparison.

Lizette, poor dear, would never quite lose that pinched, strained expression, but she was tall, nearly as tall as Kitty, and no one could see her foot under the long bridesmaid's dress. It was so like Kitty, sweet and generous, to insist on Lizette living with them at Castle Andriff, and happy-go-lucky Simon did not mind.

When Jinny had cleared out her bedroom cupboard she felt for a box on the shelf. It was fastened, and bound with tape. She hesitated for a moment, and then she took down the box, and sat beside it on the bed.

She undid the tape, and lifted the lid. It was full of letters. on top of the letters were some half-dozen paintings. There was one of herself, with her hair down her back, which he had done that Christmas when they had all come to Clonmere. There were two of Clonmere, and a pen-and-ink sketch of Doon Island. The remaining paintings were of mountains, snow-covered, and vast stretches of land that looked bare and unfriendly. Jinny gazed at them slowly, one by one, and then put them aside, and took up Hal's letters. The first wild, miserable ones were from London, and then there was that brave, hopeful letter written in Liverpool, the night before he sailed for Canada.

"I know you believe in me, Jinny," he said, "even if nobody else does. And one day my father will be proud of me too."

The remaining letters all bore the Winnipeg post-mark, and most of them had been written in the early years in Canada. She could see the dates on the envelopes-nearly every month in 1881 and '82. The letters had a light-hearted, schoolboy flavour; everything was new and exciting, he was so glad he had taken the big decision. Oxford, and all that Oxford stood for, seemed another world already.

"I see we lost the Boat Race as usual," he wrote, "so my leaving the boat did not give them any better luck! I thought of the crew on the day, and said a prayer for them, but as I was out on the ranch rounding cattle all day from sunrise to sunset I had not much time to waste thinking of my friends. It's a grand life, and I'm enjoying every minute of it."

They were full of hope, these first letters; he was going to make a success of ranching, he was certain of it.

"Of course the first few years will be the hardest," he said, "and it's difficult living on the allowance I get from great-grandfather's will. But I haven't had to ask my father for a penny, and that is all that matters.

Tell Molly I have grown a beard and look strikingly handsome."

There was a smudged snapshot enclosed in one of the letters written about this time. Hal bearded, in his shirt-sleeves, looking a great ruffian. He stood arm-in-arm with two of his fellow ranchers.

"We drive down to Winnipeg once a month," he wrote in '83, "and spend all our money and see the sights and treat the girls. Last month we had a free fight in a saloon, Frank, my partner, getting rather wild in his cups and knocking another fellow over the head. Of course I had to back him up, and we spent a night in jail for our pains. My first experience behind bars. If Adeline got to hear of it she would say "I told you so." Thank dear Uncle Tom for his most welcome cheque. He mustn't do it again."

And then in '84 and '85 the tone changed, slowly, almost imperceptibly.

"Frank is getting impossible," he said, "and I think we shall have to part company. I am going to try on my own and see if I can't do better. I have enough money saved to buy a small ranch, where I can be my own boss."

Somehow the idea must have come to nothing, for after six months of silence he wrote again, saying that he had been lucky enough to get a position in a bank in Winnipeg, which was a pleasant change after the rough life of the past few years.

"I've come to the conclusion that you have to be born to ranching to make a real success of it," he told Jinny, "and the climate is pretty hard for someone like myself who doesn't belong to the country. I lost about a stone in weight last winter. The early mornings were the worst, getting up in the dark and going out into the snow, and no proper food either. How I longed for one of Aunt Harriet's cakes! Now I'm in the town it's much easier, and I have quite comfortable lodgings."

But the bank did not last two months, for the next letter came from Toronto, and was only a few lines.

"I've started painting again," said Hal. "After all, it is the thing I like best, and what I've always wanted to do. No one to give orders, and my time is my own. One or two people here say I've been a damn fool to try anything else. I don't suppose I shall make a fortune at it, but I feel free again, which I haven't done for some time."

There was silence then for a year. The next letter, written in the autumn of '86, was one of quiet despair. The handwriting was changed, shaky, and in places almost impossible to read.

"I've been very ill," he said, "my health has all gone to pieces. Adeline was right about me after all, and you were wrong. I'm useless, a failure, and I would end it all if only I had the courage.

I sold one or two pictures, but I haven't done any work now for months. Think about me sometimes, Jinny, and when you do, remember me as I was that Christmas at Clonmere, when I was twenty, and you were sixteen. You wouldn't think much of me now."

This was the last letter he had written to her, three years ago. She had answered the letter, and many months later it had been returned to her, with the words "Gone away" written across the envelope. She remembered going down to the study and telling the whole story to her father, the tears running down her cheeks. He had been so kind and understanding, and had read Hal's last letter sitting beside her, with his arm about her shoulders.

"If only I were a man," Jinny said, between her tears, "I'd go out to Canada and bring him home.

I know I should find him."

Tom Callaghan looked at the eager, hopeful eyes, the small, determined chin.

"I believe you would, Jinny," he said, "but God made you a woman, and perhaps one day you will find your Hal, and give him greater comfort."

Three years ago… Jinny put the letters carefully back in the box and the paintings on top, and closed the lid. She would never throw them away, she would read them again and again, until she was an old woman of eighty. Maybe Hal was dead and suffered no longer, but it made no difference. She would always remember the boy who had held her hand in the dark, ghostly wing of Clonmere that Christmas Day, and was haunted and alone. He would be nearly thirty now, if he was still alive; a boy no longer. Hal, who had sat on the table in the dairy drinking buttermilk and dipping his finger into the cream when her mother's back was turned. Hal, teasing her, laughing, his hands in his pockets. Hal sailing his boat in the creek… Jinny had many pictures in her mind, all of them dear and sweet. And they would have to last her all her life, for there would never be any more.

She put the box of letters away in the cupboard, and went downstairs to her birthday lunch. Patsy the gardener had killed a chicken in honour of the occasion and her mother had baked a special pudding.

She feigned the surprise proper to the occasion, though the same ceremony was repeated every year, and her parents watched her unwrap her presents and give the usual cry of pleasure and astonishment. It was a year by year routine, delightful to all three.

"Father dear, a watch! How good of you and how naughty! It's the very one we admired in the shop window in Slane, and now you have slyly bought it."

"No slyness at all," smiled Tom.

"Kitty Flower drove into Slane from Andriff and got it for me."

"And a writing-case from you, mother. Why am I so spoilt?" Jinny got up from the table, and kissed both her parents. "Of course, I know what it is," she said. "Father wants to borrow the watch so that he can remember to be in time for church, and mother will write down all the recipes on my new paper.

The plot was hatched between you both."

"You see too much," said Tom, "and anyway, what are you going to do with your birthday afternoon? Drive over and see Kitty?"

"No, I think I shall go for a walk, if neither you nor mother need me."

"I intend making jam," said Harriet, "but I'll spare you for once."

It was difficult to believe, thought Jinny, as she walked that afternoon in Clonmere, down by the creek, and looked away across the harbour to Hungry Hill, that beneath that rugged granite face, so white and still under the summer sun, men toiled and sweated and broke themselves and died, and all for the sake of someone who lived far away, in another country, who cared nothing for them or for their families. His house here, beside the water, was like a sepulchre, the windows shuttered and barred.

Sometimes it came to life, when Molly and her husband and children spent a fortnight or so beneath its roof, but mostly it would stay closed, as it was today, Henry Brodrick and his wife lived at Brighton now, so Molly said they had sold the house in Lancaster Gate. And here was Clonmere, waiting for the owner who never came. Jinny stared up at the little balcony in the new wing. It was strange to think that perhaps no one had ever stood there and looked down upon the grass bank and the drive. Once people had done so in their dreams, and the dreams had come to nothing.

Jinny walked away from the castle, and followed the path by the creek to the lodge gates. She could see the paddle-steamer from Mundy thrashing its way across the harbour to Doonhaven. Now it had passed Doon Island, and come to anchor outside the harbour wall.

Visitors came these days, since they had built the hotel at Andriff. And there would be some of the miners' wives, back from market-day in Mundy.

Soldiers too, bound for the garrison on Doon Island. Now and again the garrison would be strengthened, according to the whims and fears of those in authority. But nobody had much interest in politics in Doonhaven.

Jinny paid a few calls at the cottages in Oakmount, and it was past five o'clock by the time she arrived home at the Rectory. She went in through the garden. Patsy was chopping wood outside the dairy.

"You have a visitor, Miss Jinny," he said, jerking his head towards the house. "Came ashore in the steamer, he did, and I tell you straight I knew him at once, for all he's run to nothing."

"Who is it, Patsy?" asked Jinny.

"No, you go in to the Rector, Miss Jinny.

I'll not be telling you."

And Patsy went on with his chopping, shaking his head, and muttering to himself.

Jinny found her mother standing in the hall. She looked anxious, a little sad.

"I thought you were never coming," she said. "Would you go to your father? He's in the study. And, Jinny dear, prepare for a surprise. At least, something between a surprise and a shock. It's so strange that this should have happened on your birthday."

She hesitated, half smiling. Yet there was a tear in the corner of her eye.

Jinny went into the study. Her father was standing by the mantelpiece talking to someone who sat in the long chair by the window, with his back towards her. There was something about the square shoulders, the angle of the head.

She took a step forward, unbelieving, yet strangely certain.

"It's Hal, isn't it?" she said.

He rose from the chair, tall, gaunt, a shadow of himself, oddly different from the dream she had made of him all these years. There were lines of suffering and disillusionment on his face, and deep furrows under his eyes. He looked older than his thirty years, older and yet strangely immature. It was Hal with his youth stripped from him, and hope still in his heart. He came towards her and took her hands, and the smile was Hal's smile, the thing that she loved and that she remembered best.

"You see," he said, "I've come back. I'm a failure, I've achieved nothing. But Uncle Tom says I can stay. You won't turn me away, will you, Jinny? You do believe in me still?"

After Hal and Jinny were married they settled down in what had been Doctor Armstrong's old house in Doonhaven, which had stood empty now since his death some years before. It was only five minutes' walk from the Rectory. The Rector and his wife started them off with furniture and linen, and Jinny was a splendid little manager, she had the doctor's house snug and habitable within a fortnight.

They spent their brief honeymoon by the lakes, bringing back with diem a photograph taken of them both the last day in Slane before returning to Doonhaven. They stood side by side, rather stiff, rather self-conscious, Hal with his hat in his hand and a suspicious, proud look on his face, as though he faced an accuser instead of a photographer. Jinny eager, hopeful, her sailor hat on the back of her brown, curly head, her hands clasping a small muff. The photograph was placed with great pride on the mantelpiece of their new home.

It was strange, thought Hal, to be living down in Doonhaven instead of at Clonmere. It gave him a funny sense of inferiority, which he could not quite get over. He hoped Jinny did not realise it. She was so dear to him, so loving and so kind, and took such a pride in their home, which was nothing but a rather bare, ugly house in the middle of the village. Hal would not for the world have her suspect that it worried him to look out of the sitting-room window at the Post Office, and have Doolan the shoemaker as his next-door neighbour. It was not snobbery that made him resent it, but an unspoken longing for the space and solitude of Clonmere. It was there that he belonged, not in the village of Doonhaven.

When these thoughts passed through his mind he would hate himself for his ingratitude., taking special care to compliment Jinny on her new curtains, or her arrangement of the flowers, or a cake she had baked for Sunday.

"Sometimes I'm a bear and a brute, sweetheart," he told her, drawing her on his knee, "and I beg of you to be patient with me at those times, and take no notice. I've brought black moods home with me from Canada, as well as rotten health."

"That's what I'm here for, Hal," she answered, running her hand through his hair, "to chase away the black moods and hold your hand."

"You're a darling," he said, "and I am the luckiest man in the world. . Now give me the hammer and some nails, and I'll see if I can fit up that shelf you want in the pantry. Canada has done one thing for me if nothing else, it's made me a handy man about the house."

Before they decided to live in the house in the village, the Rector had asked Hal what he felt about returning to Clonmere. Hal had shaken his head at once, an obstinate expression on his face.

"The place is not mine," he said, "it's my father's. He has not written to me since I left London nine years ago. How could I possibly go and live at Clonmere after that?"

"Have you ever written to him, boy, and asked his forgiveness?"

"Yes-when I first got out to Winnipeg. I had no answer. That was enough for me. I shall never write to him again as long as I live."

Tom Callaghan said no more. God alone could heal the breach between father and son, and if he tried to meddle it would only make matters worse. He wrote and told his old friend that Hal had returned to Doonhaven, of his ill-health and failure out in Canada, and the engagement to his daughter. Henry made little comment in his reply.

"I never expected anything else," he said, "but that Hal would make a mess of his life. I am afraid your daughter is throwing herself away on him."

So Clonmere remained shuttered and Hal Brodrick lived in Doonhaven instead, with Jinny doing his cooking and a girl coming in every morning to scrub floors, with himself cleaning the boots and shoes and bringing in the coal.

"I did it all in Canada," he said, "and I can do it here too," and then he would look across the way and see Mike Doolan staring at him with a grin on his face as though he despised him, and if he spoke to him the fellow would be off-hand and indifferent.

"It's funny," said Hal to Jinny, "they don't like it. When we lived at Clonmere and were "the gentry," and rode past in the carriage, they hated us, no doubt, but they respected us, or at least they respected my father. And now I've come to live amongst them there's resentment, we make an intrusion. Oh, not you: they're used to you. You're the Rector's daughter. But I'm different. I'm a Brodrick, and they expect me to kick them in the pants, even if they hate me while I do it."

"You're too sensitive," said Jinny, "too much on the defensive, and wondering what they are going to say to you. Just be natural, just be yourself. They'll be friendly in time; they are like children."

"Which is myself?" said Hal. "I'm damned if I know. I thought I was a rancher, and I was not. I believed myself a painter, and I could not sell a picture. I can't even call myself Hal Brodrick of Clonmere. I'm a useless rotter with a wife who's too good for me, living on the good-will of my father-in-law. And the people know it, that's the trouble.

They've every right to despise me."

"They don't despise you, and you are none of those horrid things. You are my own Hal," said Jinny.

She was just a little worried, all the same.

Hal's first rapture at being back and seeing her again had worn rather thin. He was often silent and depressed, and then would be in despair for fear he had wounded her and was making her miserable.

"I'm a burden to you," he said; "you'll be sick of me before you've been married six months. I'd no right to Come home and ask you."

Jinny told some of this to her father, and he nodded his head in understanding.

"The trouble is," he said, "that Hal feels he is dependent on us, and yet he hasn't the strength of mind to try to stand on his own. I'll have a talk with him and see what I can do."

And then, sitting round the fire in the Rectory study, it would be difficult to imagine that Hal was ever anything but charming, light" hearted and gay. He would chaff Aunt Harriet on skimming the cream with a scallop shell, and tease Uncle Tom on the length of the Sunday sermon, and standing on the hearth with his arm round Jinny's waist it might have been Henry himself, some thirty years before, thought the Rector, with the same amusing chatter about people and places, telling them of wild-cat schemes and pranks he had played in Canada with his partner, the dissolute Frank."

"Are you too proud, Hal," he said, when Jinny and her mother had left the room, "to try to earn your living?"

"Not too proud," said Hal, smiling, "but too lazy. That's why I failed in Canada."

"No," said Tom, "you failed in Canada because you were friendless and alone, and spent all your money in the Winnipeg saloons. That won't happen here."

"What do you suggest, then, Uncle Tom? No one will buy my pictures. I hawked three canvases round Slane last week, and didn't sell one of them. It made me ashamed before Jinny, who still believes I'm a good painter. But after I'd had a couple of drinks I felt better about it."

"Yes, lad, and if you go on like that you'll be ill again, as you were in Canada. No, keep your painting as a hobby, and a very good hobby it is. I want to know if you have the courage to do something else."

"What should I do?"

The Rector looked at him with a twinkle in his eye. "You know old Griffiths, the manager up at the mine?" he said.

"Yes."

"His head clerk has gone to America. He wants someone to do the books and keep accounts, and the hundred and one odd jobs that he can't see to himself.

Office hours, of course, nine till six.

Small salary, but not to be despised. What about it?"

Hal thrust his hands in his pockets and made a face at his father-in-law.

"A Brodrick go and earn a few pounds a week in the mine that will one day bring him thousands?" he said. "It's a funny sort of suggestion."

"Never mind about that," answered the Rector.

"It's the present you have to think about, not the future.

And there would be no question of taking money from your father. The salary is paid to the head clerk, whoever takes the place. The question is, can you pull yourself together and do it?

I know someone who would be very proud of you if you did, and that's Jinny."

Hal did not answer for a moment. He stood staring at the fire.

"I want to please Jinny more than anything else on earth," he said, "and yet I know in my heart I shall always let her down. I'm no good, you see, Uncle Tom. I shall make a mess of this job as I've done of everything else."

"No, Hal boy, you will not."

"All right then, I'll have a shot at it."

And so on the 25th of February, 1890, Hal Brodrick walked up to his father's mines on Hungry Hill, shoulder to shoulder with the men of Doonhaven, and hanging his hat on the peg in the counting-house, sat down on a high stool before a desk, with young Murphy the grocer's son on the other side of him. Old Griffiths sat in state in an inner room. Hal remembered him standing with his hat in his hands before his father in the old days, and now Hal was his clerk, and said "Thank you, sir," for his weekly wage, just like young Murphy and the others.

It was strange to be just another employee in the mine, when twenty years ago he had driven here in state with his father, the men doffing their hats at his approach, and he remembered being taken below to watch the miners working the lodes, and visiting the engine-houses to see the great pumps at work. Now for the first time he became acquainted with the vast inner life of the mine, which seemed to have no connection with the world outside.

At six in the morning, in his house at Doonhaven, Hal would wake to hear clanging from Hungry Hill the great bell that called the miners to work, and allowed the night-shift to come wan and tired-eyed to the surface. The bell had gone day after day for nearly seventy years, calling the men and women and little children to the mines, but the Brodricks lying in their beds at Clonmere had never heard it. There was a line that ran from Doonhaven out to the mines on Hungry Hill, and those miners who lived in the village would ride out in the trucks to their work.

Hal would hear the whistle of steam and the clanging of wheels on the rollers, and sometimes the sound of running feet under his window as the men hastened to catch the trucks. It would still be dark outside, with the stars shining.

"Poor devils," whispered Hal to Jinny, feeling in some queer, obscure fashion that he was to blame for their early rising in the bleak raw morning, and then his conscience would prick him as he arrived himself at the counting-house shortly before nine, having ridden out in all probability in the Rector's trap.

The women and children in the dressing-sheds who had the work of washing the ore would look up as he drove past, and he would have the feeling that they laughed at him, and resented him too, believing that he had the place by favour and did not need the money.

At the end of each month, when the books had to be made up and the returns sent in, Hal would find himself working overtime to get through with the stuff on his desk, and then he too would catch the six-o'clock truck with the miners in the village, Jinny rising bright and early to keep him company and see that he ate his breakfast before leaving. The first time he did this the men stood apart from him in the truck, joking and talking amongst themselves.

There was a fellow called Jim Donovan, son of Pat Donovan who kept the farm beneath the hill, and the first of his family, by his talk, to become a miner.

"Sure, it's the truth," he said, "we owned the land for miles around in the old days," looking over his shoulder at Hal as he spoke.

"That's right, Jim," said his mates, "you had it on lease from the devil."

"No devil at all," answered Jim, "my grandfather's grandfather's grandfather, he was nothing less than a Chief, living below there at the castle, and as for knowing a pig from a sow, I tell you he wouldn't have soiled his hands with either. He had a thousand men to work for him, and the King of France was his best friend."

"That's true," said one of the men; "the French were always for helping us, and the Spanish too. I had it from my father."

"Who was it, then," asked another, "who shot a landlord for interfering with the smugglers? That's another true story, and happened in Doonhaven."

"It was one of the Donovans," said Jim, "and small blame to him either. What right had the landlord to spoil the livelihood of innocent men? I'd shoot anyone who did the same to me."

"And be strung up by the redcoats in the garrison," laughed his friend.

"Oh, I care nothing for them," said Jim, waving his hand. "We'll be rid of the lot of them before you can turn round. And then I'll invite you to shoot hares on the island."

If Hal had been in Canada he would have joined in the fun, and chaffed Jim Donovan, as he had done his fellow-ranchers. But back at home it was different. These men could not forget he was a Brodrick, whose father owned Clonmere and the mine also, and they believed him stiff and proud. Should he try to joke with them they would feel awkward and shy, or imagine he did it out of condescension, to stand in well with them for some ulterior design. And so, in spite of smiles and valiant efforts to seem friendly and natural, Hal would achieve no more than a "Good-day," and a remark about the weather.

It was part of his work, as clerk to the manager, to supervise the payment of wages every Friday. It was the day he hated most in the week. He would have to sit in the counting-house, beside Mr. Griffiths, with a stack of coins in front of him, reading the names out from a sheet of paper, and then handing the required amount to the manager as each man in turn stepped forward to take his pay. The wages seemed so pitifully small, the coins so few in number. Every Friday morning his heart would sink as he heard the tramp of men queuing up outside the door of the counting-house, and then Mr.

Griffiths would take his place beside him and the names would be called. The skilled miners first, and the engineers, descending in scale to the surface men, and the dressers, and the women and children.

"Pat Torrens," he would call, and a man would step forward, lean and grey, his skin like wrinkled parchment, and a great Adam's apple moving in his throat, big pouches under his eyes. Two pounds.

Two pounds for working eight hours at a stretch, on his back perhaps, in the damp, low levels beneath Hungry Hill, and coming to the surface to change his clothes in the draughty shed where the wind whistled through the open doors, home to his cabin or cottage to eat potatoes and salt fish and sleep before the reeking turf fire, and then back again, down to the black rock-face and the wet walls of the mine.

Hal would hand over the little pile of coins, avoiding the man's eye. Surely Pat Torrens must think to himself, "This is one of the men I'm working for.

Every ounce of stuff I break out of the rock and bring to the surface, with my sweat and labour, turns into gold when it is sent across the water to Hal Brodrick's father. He lives in a great house and has servants and carriages and sits on his backside all day. He does not even have the running of the mine, like the manager. He just lies back and puts the gold into his pockets." Pat Torrens would shuffle from the counting-house and Hal would call the next name on the list.

And so on and so on for an hour or so, finishing with the women and children. One or two little fellows of not more than nine years of age, coming forward for their two-shilling piece, the reward for standing barefoot on the tin as it was washed in the "buddle," or for breaking large pieces of ore with a hammer outside the dressing-sheds.

One Friday morning, when the last had been paid, Hal turned to the manager in anger and disgust.

"Surely it's not right?" he said. "They ought to get more. Why, when every man, woman and child in the mines has been paid, it's barely a tenth of what goes to my father."

Mr. Griffiths stared at him.

"The pay is good," he said. "I've known it lower in other mines. They don't expect more. Of course your father must make his profit. He's the owner, isn't he? Don't tell me you're a Radical-you'll be preaching revolution next."

"I'm not a Radical, or a revolutionist," said Hal. "I don't care a twopenny damn about politics. But I feel ashamed, that's all."

"Oh, come," said the manager, getting up and reaching for his coat, "that's all false sentiment. You keep the books in order, and forget the moral side of it. Besides, the day will come when you will be the owner yourself.

You can give all your profits away then, if you feel like it."

"Yes," said Hal, "but that's just the point. I shan't want to. I'll be thinking of sitting back and taking my ease, the same as my father."

He would drive home in the evening, turning his back on the sight and sound of the mines. The tall chimneys, black against the hill, would point their fingers to the sky, and a glare of fire would come from the open doors of the boiler-houses. He would hear the winding rattle of the drums in the shafts, and the ceaseless throb of the engine pumps. There would be the inevitable pungent smell in the air coming from the dressing-sheds where the ore was cleansed. And once away, along the road, with the chimneys out of sight, and the smoke from the furnaces blown eastward, and the tramping miners gone below on night-shift, there would be no other sound but the steady clop-clop of Tom Callaghan's mare taking Hal back to Doonhaven, and on his left the smooth, untroubled waters of Mundy Bay. Hungry Hill would rise above him, white and silent under the moon, and away yonder the pin-prick lights of Doonhaven danced and flickered.

Yes, thought Hal, and for all my brave talk to Griffiths about the hard work and low pay of the miners, all I want really is to be living in comfort in Clonmere, because of them, with Jinny dressed for dinner as my mother used to do, and a butler waiting on her instead of that half-witted girl. I want to enjoy the mines, as my forebears did, and forget the cost.

I don't want to go back to my poky little house in the village street and know that Jinny has cooked my supper for me and is feeling tired and worn.

He would leave the trap with Patsy at the Rectory, and walk through the village to his house.

A smell of cooking would greet his nostrils as he entered, a thing he detested and which it was impossible to smother in so small a house, for all the care that Jinny took.

She came, dear girl, running to meet him, with her bright eyes full of love, and her hair a little untidy, her face flushed from bending over the stove.

"Your favourite supper," she said, beaming, "herrings and cauliflower cheese. I've been given a new recipe from mother's precious book. Oh, and the chimney's been smoking in the sitting-room; we'll have to have it swept. Kitty and Simon called from Andriff; they left us a lovely melon and some grapes. So good of them. And Simon wants to buy one of your pictures, the little sketch of Doon Island from the creek."

"He doesn't really," said Hal. "He just does it out of charity."

"No, dear, he does not. You must not be so proud. He thinks you have great talent. Kitty told me so."

"He's the only one that does, then."

"No, Hal, that's naughty. Your wife is proud of your work."

"It's more than I am. I'm a rotten painter, and a rotten husband."

"Don't be so grumpy, love. Come and sit down and rest in your chair, even if the fire is smoking, and I'll bring you your supper on a tray."

Hal flung himself down and stretched out his arms to her.

"Why should you wait on me?" he said, drawing her on to his knee. "It's I who should look after you.

I'd like to see you with your hair smoothed back, Jinny girl, and a low-cut frock, instead of that old apron and your little hands all sticky with cooking."

"I'll smooth my hair for you, and I'll wear my wedding-dress, and I'll wash my hands in milk, if you will promise to be a good boy."

"I am a good boy."

"You know what I mean by a good boy."

"You mean I'm not to help myself to the whisky bottle in the cupboard? Don't worry, sweetheart; it's empty."

"Oh, Hal, and I asked you to keep some, in case of chills and colds."

"The winter's over, there won't be any chills and colds. I'm a brute and a swine, and I don't deserve you, Jinny girl. Why should you love me?"

"I don't know, Hal, but there it is."

She smiled, and he did not move, but stretched out his legs to the smoky fire, thinking of the great hall at Clonmere and the fire-place there, where no fire had ever been lit. Presently she came back with their supper on a tray, the herrings a little over-cooked, bless her, but he swore they were excellent, and she sat down at his feet afterwards and took her mending, while he stared into the fire and played with her hair.

"It's embroidery you should be doing," he told her, "not my old bocks."

"And if I let your socks go undarned," she asked, "who would do them?"

"You ought to have a lady's maid," he said, "and half-a-dozen servants to look after you. And me, dressed in a dinner-jacket, be coming into my drawing-room with a flower in my buttonhole, having dined on a saddle of venison and drunk old brandy."

"That means you didn't care for the herrings," she said in distress.

"It means nothing of the sort," he said, kissing the top of her head. "It means that I let my imagination run away with me when I look at that funny little top-knot of yours, pinned out of the way of your cooking. You have a neck that I can encircle with one hand. I wonder Patsy has never run amok and felled it with his axe when killing your mother's chickens."

"Ah, get along with you. Would you take your great hand away? I can't see the hole in your sock."

"Let it alone, darling."

"And you go barefoot?"

"I would have you sit beside me in the chair and watch the pictures in the fire."

She laid the mending aside, and curled up beside him in the old leather chair that had come from the Rectory, and they said little to one another, but listened to the clock in the corner, left by Doctor Armstrong, and heard the soft rain patter against the window, and saw the smoky turf sink lower on the hearth.

Up at the Rectory Tom Callaghan was writing to Herbert Brodrick at Lletharrog.

Dearest old Herby, You can't think what a real pleasure it was to get a letter once more from one of the family. It is years since I saw you, but I have photographs of you and the brothers as mementos of the past. It was so good to read your kind words about our dear Jinny, and that she has been a blessing to poor Hal. I never now say a word about either of them to Henry when I write, as no matter what I say he always speaks about the hopelessness of Hal's case. ' I am glad to say Hal is, I think, one of the most charming fellows I ever met-in fact his daddy over again, only with the one drawback, and he is getting over that too… There are no babies as yet, but I tell Jinny they will come along by-and-by. They are certainly one of the happiest couples it has ever been my good fortune to see'.

Hal was not a great newspaper reader. He took little interest in the affairs of the day. On winter evenings when he came back from the mines all he wanted to do was to sit with Jinny in front of the fire, and listen to her prattle, or laugh with her over the happenings in the counting-house. Therefore when he went one day to Slane, in the early spring of '94, to make purchases for Jinny and the household, and stood before the bar in one of the public-houses and turned over the pages of the Slane and County Advertiser, it was news to him, and something of a shock, to read a long column in the middle page about the large tin deposits in Malay, and the companies that had been formed to work them; and how, in the opinion of the writer, the discoveries would kill the home markets.

Life was so much a matter of routine these days-the day up at the mines, the keeping of the books, the going home to Jinny and the baby-that the rise and fall of prices had conveyed nothing to him, and when old Griffiths shook his head and spoke gloomily about the future Hal had put it down to the man's natural pessimism, that could see small hope in mining prospects, for either tin or copper. When Hal had read the article, he turned to the financial page to see the current price of tin. It was able84 a ton. It had been able100 six months ago. Yes, old Griffiths had reason to be gloomy. Hal, content and preoccupied with his own home life, had neglected to watch the fluctuations of the trade that gave him his livelihood. He wondered what his father thought about it. That evening, when he returned home, and found his father-in-law, the Rector, seated in the living-room nursing the solemn John-Henry, he asked him if he had read the article in the Slane Advertiser.

"Yes, Hal, I have," said Tom Callaghan, "and I think the writer of the article speaks sound sense. We shall see some changes before very long."

"What do you suppose my father will do?"

"Henry always was a shrewd business man, Hal.

You may depend upon it he has been watching the Malay business and the drop in price in the last six months. He was one of the first owners to change over from copper to tin, more than fifteen years ago, and the people in Cornwall followed suit, at least those who struck lucky and also had the capital to do so."

The Rector hesitated, and, Jinny coming in at this moment to bear John-Henry off to bed, he waited until she had left the room, and then looked up at his son-in-law.

"You haven't heard any rumours, then?"

"No, Uncle Tom," said Hal. "I never listen to gossip anyway. Rumours of what?"

"That your father intends selling the mines very shortly?"

Hal shook his head.

"It's the first I've heard of it," he said, "but perhaps Griffiths would not say anything to me, out of delicacy. As for the men, they fabricate fresh tales every day. Last week I heard Jim Donovan tell his pal there was gold at the foot of Hungry Hill, and it all belonged to him."

"Jim Donovan has "folie de grandeur" like others of his family. No, Hal, it's no idle gossip I'm repeating to you. I had a talk with Griffiths after church on Sunday, and he says letters have been coming from across the water, which presumably you haven't seen, from some director of a London company, also letters from your father and from your father's solicitors, and negotiations are in progress."

Hal lit his pipe, and stirred the fire with his foot.

"After what I have read today I can't blame him," he said. "My father, I mean. If the price of tin falls much further I suppose it will not pay him to continue working the mines. But what fool of a fellow has he induced to buy them off him?"

"Speculators," said Uncle Tom, "people who know nothing of the land or the country, and will drive the mine for all they are worth, to get every ounce out of the ground before the crash comes. I'm not a prophet, but that's what will happen, you may depend upon it."

"It will be queer," said Hal, "to think of the mines no longer belonging to the family. My great-grandfather would turn in his grave."

"From all I have ever heard of him he would do nothing of the sort," said the Rector. "Copper John was no sentimentalist. He would rub his hands in satisfaction to think that his grandson Henry was getting rid of it all, in the nick of time, with his fortune intact. Not like some of the Cornish families, who have gone bankrupt. No, Hal, you Brodricks don't all run to sentiment and dreams. There are some hard-headed fellows amongst you."

"It's a pity I'm not one of them," said Hal.

"I'd have done more for myself, and for Jinny as well."

A few days later it was all over Doonhaven that Henry Brodrick had sold the mines to a London company. Mr. Griffiths took Hal aside and showed him the letters, and a copy of the agreement.

"Seventy-four years," said Hal, "and now it's finished. All the tears and the sweat and the foresight and the labour. It's funny, I've never had a lot of feeling about the mines, Mr. Griffiths. I've considered them a blot on the landscape, spoiling the rugged grandeur of Hungry Hill, but now they're to be handed over to strangers I feel resentful. I wish that it didn't have to happen."

"It won't affect you, Mr. Brodrick. The new company will take over the staff, you know."

"Yes… That's not quite what I meant, though."

"Well, your father is a very clever man, that's all I can say," said the manager. "He's made the bargain of a life-time. And you needn't worry.

You'll reap the benefit of it all one day."

He doesn't see the point, thought Hal; he doesn't see that the mines were part of the family, like Clonmere. And now one is sold, and the other is barred and shuttered. It's queer. It's the breaking up of things.

A fortnight later the new director came over in person to inspect his property. He was a hard-faced man, with a north-country accent and a loud, authoritative voice. He walked round the mines, hustling Mr. Griffiths, and rattling questions at him which flustered the old manager. Hal only caught a glimpse of him as he passed through the counting-house. His visit was followed by others: people he sent down to give expert advice about the workings; new engineers, new foremen. Strangers to the country.

And for the first time in his life Hal felt one with the miners, and in a strange way they sensed it too. The men were more open with him, more friendly, they cursed the intruders as "dour-faced northern bastards," and laughed when Hal called them something stronger still. He knew now what it felt like to be employed by a stranger, working to a stranger's orders, and knowing that the product of the mine would give him nothing in return but his bare weekly wage.

"You see," he told Jinny, "what a hypocrite I've been. These few years, going up to the mines every day, I've had it in the back of my mind all the time that they belonged to the family, and one day they would be mine. And although it made me shy with the men, it gave me a sort of satisfaction, deep down. And now they are nothing to do with me any more. I might be working for the Slane Timber Works or the brick-yard in Mundy. And I feel sullen and fed-up, just like Jim Donovan or any of the others."

"I know," said Jinny. "It's sad. Ever since I remember anything, I saw the trucks going up from the harbour to the mines with "Brodrick" written on them. Will they have another name now?"

"I don't know and I don't care," said Hal, "but I can't forgive my father for it all the same."

The Rector was right when he summed up the purchasers as speculators. The method in the Doonhaven mines, instigated by Copper John and continued by Henry when he lived at Clonmere, was to explore the lodes carefully and slowly, never going to too great a depth at a time and risking the wasting of the ore by excessive flooding. They had planned for the years ahead, and not for the immediate present. The ore that might be reached with greater caution and more skill in six or seven years could be left until that time, and the stuff nearer the surface dealt with first.

The new company cared for none of these ideas. They wanted immediate value for their money, and the richest lodes tapped and the ore brought to the surface and away for shipment, all in six months. The price of tin was dropping all the time, and unless they could make a quick profit at once their losses would be enormous. The Doonhaven miners, used to a casual, happy-go-lucky method of working for the past twenty years, for old Griffiths was no driver, were expected to work longer hours and to extract double the quantity of stuff, all at the same time. The only way to achieve this was to raise the men's wages.

The new owners decided to take the risk, and by announcing a spectacular rise in wages all round get the necessary labour out of the men, for the few months they had set themselves as a working margin.

The news was hailed gleefully by the men, underground and above the surface. The new owners were no longer "dour-faced bastards" but "fine go-ahead fellows, who knew their job." A feverish activity spread over the mining population. The furnaces blazed all night, the trucks rattled to and fro from Hungry Hill to Doonhaven. Hal, scratching his head over the books, would come back late in the evening and profess himself bewildered by the change of speed. His father-in-law looked grave and shook his head.

"It's a false boom," he said; "the men don't understand. Look at the price of tin in this morning's paper. able75 a ton. A ten-pound drop in under two months. The speculators will clear out of it before a very few months are over, and the mines will close."

"But there's God's quantity of tin still in the ground," protested Hal, "and copper too, if it was only worked. I heard one of the fellows talking about it the other day."

"It will be worked just as long as it pays the company to do so," said the Rector, "and after that it will remain untouched where Nature planted it in the first place."

April… May… June… July… and nearly five months had passed since the mines had changed hands. The third week in July the new senior engineer, working under contract to the London company, told Mr. Griffiths that he had been sent for by the director to report.

"If they want me to carry on through the summer," he told the manager, "I shan't be able to do it without complete new fittings to the main pumps, and between you and me I don't for a moment think they will stand the expense. I rather suspect this is the last I see of Doonhaven."

He left two days later, taking his staff of three with him. A new rumour began to circulate that the present machinery was to be scrapped and new engines shipped across the water from Bronsea. This was followed by a further rumour that the wages of the miners were to be raised again. One or two of the men asked Hal if he had any private information.

"I'm sorry," said Hal. "I know no more than you do; but with tin at its present low level I hardly think the company will raise wages any higher. Have you seen today's paper? Tin's down to able64 a ton."

He was climbing into the trap, preparatory to driving home. One of the men, Jim Donovan, stood with his hand on the rein.

"Is that why Mr. Henry Brodrick sold the mines, then?" he said.

"My father does not write to me," he said, "but I think it's pretty obvious why he sold them."

"He had the large price for them, I'll be bound," said Donovan, nudging his companion. "He won't suffer from the fall in price, who-ever else does."

"That's what they call a sound business sense, Jim, in financial circles," said Hal, driving away.

The men stared after him, muttering amongst themselves.

They did not believe a word he told them, of course, thought Hal. They imagined that as the son of the original owner he must know much more than he chose to say. Old Griffiths began to look preoccupied and worried.

On the twenty-fourth of the month the manager went to Slane, and sent word back by the boy who drove him that business would keep him in the city for two or three days. In the harbour at Doonhaven one of the ships belonging to the company was due to sail with her cargo for Bronsea. Hal had occasion to go on board and give some instructions to the skipper. He knew the man well, he had been master of the vessel since his grandfather's day, "Is it true, sir, what they were telling me in Bronsea before I left?" asked the skipper.

"What's that, Captain Davis?" said Hal.

"Why, that the Lucy-Ann is the last ship to carry tin back to Bronsea?"

Hal put down the glass of rum that the skipper had poured out for him.

"I think they were pulling your leg in Bronsea," he said quietly.

"I don't know, sir; it wasn't just idle dock-yard chatter. It was one of the agents from the smelting works. "Next load will be your last, Davis," he said to me. "The Doonhaven mines are going to close down." I haven't heard a word of it this end. The talk here is all for another change of owners again, and a fortune for every man-jack in the place."

"The truth is probably somewhere between the two," said Hal.

"I've been on this trade for fifty years," said the skipper. "Came first as a youngster aboard my father's ship the Henrietta, as a lad of twelve.

I can remember your great-grandfather-old Copper John, they used to call him-with his shovel hat and his cudgel stick, coming down here to the harbour to inspect the cargo. No Plimsol mark for him. Down to the scuppers with the copper, and the decks awash, and off to Bronsea on the tide, fair wind or foul. Well, that's a long time back now. It will seem strange to come no more to Mundy Bay of an evening, and see the lights of the garrison on Doon Island winking at me across the water."

"Let's try some more of your excellent rum," smiled Hal, "and drink to the past. It never does to think about the future."

Next morning when he drove up to the mine he found the road blocked with men, all standing about talking excitedly, women and children amongst them. Some of the men were grinning, and shouting jokes one to the other, the remainder looked bewildered, and were going from group to group gesticulating, asking questions.

The dressing-shed doors were wide open, no one was at work inside them. One of the firemen leant from the boiler-house, a pipe in his mouth. The biggest crowd was gathered round the shaft, where the shift below had just come above ground, and was being seized upon by the surface-workers.

"What about that three-shilling rise?" yelled someone, and an answering roar came from the crowd of men.

"What's happened?" said Hal, to a group of men gathered at the counting-house door.

"Work's suspended," said one. "Look at the notice there on the door. We're all to be paid off… We don't any of us understand. What's wrong, Mr. Brodrick? There's plenty of stuff below ground."

Hal did not answer. He went into the counting-house. Mr. Griffiths was standing in the middle of the room. He had not taken off his coat or his hat. He was surrounded by a little group of skilled workers and engineers, who were plying him with questions. His face was white and drawn.

"It's no use asking me," he said. "I can't do anything. I have my orders, just like the rest of you.

I shall draw my salary today for the last time. It's not my fault, it's not anyone's fault. The notices came through to the offices in Slane, and were handed on to me. What machinery there is has been bought by a firm in Slane, and will be sold as scrap, I suppose. I tell you I don't know."

"What about the stuff in the lodes," asked one of the men, "where we've been working? There's pounds of it there, not yet brought to the surface."

"It will have to stay," said the manager, "the company aren't paying for any more work. That's what was told me in Slane. Every man employed here is to be paid off today. If the firm who have bought up the machinery care to employ any of you in the clearance, no doubt they will do so. My orders don't give me any authority. I tell you it's nobody's fault.

You must blame the fall in the price of tin, that's all."

He withdrew into the inner room. Hal followed him, and found him standing before the desk, turning over papers and documents in a hopeless, resigned fashion.

"What can I do?" he said to Hal. "It's almost as big a shock to me as it is to them. It's true I've put by, my wife is a careful manager, and we've got a small property in the north where we can go and retire. But I didn't expect it so suddenly. And look at all the clearing that has to be done, files going back seventy-five years, all to be checked and sorted, some of them burnt, the rest taken into Slane. But it's the men, and the women and children, who are going to suffer, Mr. Brodrick.

They don't put aside for a rainy day. And they've been spending more freely of late, ever since they got that rise of pay. If it had come gradually they might have understood, but coming suddenly as it has done, they're going to take it hard.".

They were grim hours that followed, when Hal, for the last time, sat beside Mr. Griffiths in the counting-house and gave the men their pay. The tramp of feet had never sounded so ominous, so heavy, and each man as he stepped forward to receive his money asked the same question. "Why had it happened?"

"What did they close the mine for, when the stuff was as rich as ever underground?" Some were bewildered, some truculent and angry, one or two used threats. "We've been cheated," said one of them, "induced to stay and lost our chances elsewhere. I've a son in South Africa, wanted me to join him two months back, in the mines out there, and I refused. Now it's too late. What am I going to do? Sit in this country and starve?"

"I'm very sorry," said the manager wearily, for the hundredth time. "I can't do anything. Blame the price of tin."

The tramp of feet, the tired, angry faces of men and women-they never stopped coming, one after the other, through the counting-house door.

"The owners don't lose by it," said some man.

"They make their pile and retire in comfort. It's we that have to pay for it."

"True for you," said Jim Donovan, who stood behind him, looking at Hal as he received his money.

"Here's Mr. Brodrick, son of the last owner; he'll not be parting with his shirt, will you, Mr.

Brodrick? Sure, you can go and live across the water if you have the mind." He tramped past, sullen and resentful, his usual impudent, cheerful face set in hard lines of anger and disappointment.

They did not understand, once they had been paid, that this was the end, and there was no more to do. They continued to stand about the shafts and the boiler-houses and the dressing-sheds, staring stupidly at the half-loaded trolleys and trucks.

"The waste of it," was heard on every side. "It doesn't make sense. There's something wrong somewhere.

There's a mistake been made."

But there was no mistake. The mines on Hungry Hill had ceased to work. The fires went out at last, and the smokeless stacks lifted black faces to the sky. The whine and whirl of machinery were still. A queer silence seemed to fall upon the place, broken only by the restless walking up and down of the bewildered men, who would not disperse. In the counting-house the papers were filed and packed away in bags and boxes. Hal could scarcely see; he had worked up to ten o'clock every evening now for five days. Wherever he went and wherever he walked he would find one of the miners standing idle by the road, that same dazed, resentful look upon his face as Jim Donovan had worn. The women called to one another in shrill voices from their cottages. The children, free and excited, chased each other about the empty dressing-sheds, or made castles in the slack-heaps that had not been cleared away. No one stopped them. They could do as they liked. There was, no order any more, no supervision. Four days, five days, six days, and the work of clearing the files and accounts was almost done.

The men had begun to drift away, to walk down in bands to the village, coming back drunk and singing from the public-houses. The mine began to wear a deserted air. The door of the engine-house swung backwards and forwards on a broken hinge.

"Desolation reigns supreme," Hal said to Jinny. "I never want to see the mines again. Why the devil didn't I leave when my father sold them five months ago?"

The Rector, and his wife, and Jinny were doing their best to help the miners' families, those who had no money put by for such an emergency. It was difficult for Tom Callaghan, because the most improvident of the families did not attend his church, and came under the care of the priest.

"No time for differences now," said Tom, in consultation with him, a young raw fellow, hardly more than a boy, who had been appointed to Doonhaven only six months before. "We have got to work together, and see what we can do to help the people. It's the greatest mercy of God that this blow has fallen in midsummer, instead of in winter."

The young priest was only too willing to co-operate, and to seek advice from the older man.

It was decided to use the parish room belonging to the Rector as a store for food and clothing, and anyone in real need would be able to go there and ask for assistance.

The store was put in charge of Jinny and her mother.

Meanwhile the Rector and Mr. Griffiths were kept busy going backwards and forwards to Slane to see the emigration authorities, for over half the mining population began to clamour now to leave Doonhaven as soon as possible, before the autumn started, and seek a new livelihood in America and Australia and Africa.

It was easiest for those who had saved money and were skilled miners. They would soon fall on their feet again, and it was not difficult to get them a passage.

But the odd-job men, the surface workers, the firemen and others, who were trained in nothing in particular and had spent their pay every week as it came along, these constituted the problem of Doonhaven.

Many of them were local men, or had come from the neighbouring country, and had worked in the mines from early boyhood. They knew no other trade. The older men, philosophical and more easy-going, shrugged their shoulders and tilled their bit of land. It was pleasant in a way to sit in the sun and do nothing for a change; something would turn up before the winter. The younger men, restless and dissatisfied, roamed the countryside in bands, bent on mischief which they felt justified in doing. Fences were broken, chickens and pigs stolen, orchards robbed, and a spirit of terrorism began to spread abroad which brought no sympathy for the men themselves, only harsh words from the magistrates and threats to bring the soldiers ashore from the garrison on Doon Island.

"It will blow over," said Simon Flower, Kitty's husband, who had much of the easy-going tolerance of his grandfather and namesake.

"In a couple of months' time the fellows will be lifting potatoes and keeping pigs, as peaceful as you or I. Let them have their fling first."

"Yes," said the Rector, "I agree with you.

It will blow over, and they will go back to the land. But first they may do a considerable amount of damage, poor fellows, and cause trouble to themselves and to other people."

"Seriously," said Jinny, "there are several people who have become quite nervous of Jim Donovan and his crowd. They flung stones at Mrs. Griffiths when she was driving into Mundy last week, and lamed the pony. And you know I am certain it was his lot that broke all the windows in the Post Office."

They none of them really understood, thought Hal, except perhaps his father-in-law, what a shock it had been to the young men of Doonhaven to see the mines go as they had done, almost overnight. The mines of Hungry Hill, which they had known from childhood, and their fathers before them, and to which they instinctively turned for a living, had become dead and lifeless. What irked them most was the fact that the ore was still there underground, waiting to be brought to the surface. They could not understand why a precious mineral should suddenly become valueless.

"The world still needs tin, doesn't it?" Jim Donovan had asked.

How was it possible to explain to him about cheap labour in Malay? No, thought Hal, it was much simpler to give Jim Donovan a drink and tell him to forget his troubles. For himself, he was glad to be free again. Glad that the whistle of the six-o'clock engine and the clanging bells no longer woke him from sleep, and he could lie in bed, if he wanted to, until ten in the morning, and then, leaning out of his bedroom window, sniffing the summer day, decide to take his paint-box and his easel across the harbour to Clonmere, and alone all day, with a sandwich for lunch, paint the still waters of the creek below the house, the low hump of Doon Island, and the great, green shoulder of Hungry Hill.

"It's the best you've ever done," said Jinny, when after three days he brought his picture home to her and put it up in their little sitting-room, the paint still wet on the canvas. "Do you know, I am sure that if you took it to London and sent it up to the Academy they would accept it, and you would sell it for a hundred guineas?"

"A hundred rejection slips," smiled Hal.

"No, Jinny girl, I'd rather not risk the blow to my pride. It's a present for John-Henry's second birthday. He can look at it when he's a man and see the sun, as I have painted it, on the top of Hungry Hill, and think there's the old hill that brought my family good fortune. The grass will be growing out of the chimney-stacks by the time he's turned twenty-one."

They stood together, looking at the picture, and then the door of the sitting-room opened, and the Rector came into the room. He had an open letter in his hand, and he was smiling.

"I've news for you, Hal," he said, "but you'll never guess what it is.

"You've found a new job for me," said Hal, "and I warn you now that I'm not going to take it."

"Nothing of the sort," said Tom. "Here's a letter from your father. He's crossing to Slane, and he will be in Doonhaven the day after tomorrow."

The sun was setting in the west over Mundy Bay. Little mackerel clouds had come up against the wind, and now hung motionless in the pale sky, for the breeze had died away with the approach of evening.

Hal stood by the lake on Hungry Hill, looking down on Doon-haven and Clonmere. The village, a small, straggling line by the harbour water, still held the sun, but Clonmere was in shadow.

The trees made a tapestry pattern about the castle, and beyond the trees lay the moors and the white road across the moors that led to the Denmare river and Kileen. The world below seemed unreal and remote, like the mist world of a dream at daybreak. Hungry Hill alone had clarity and brightness, the air was full of scent, and the turf under his feet was firm and green. Even the granite rocks were hot where the sun had been all day.

"This is the picture I should have painted," thought Hal, "not how the hill looks from Doonhaven and Clonmere, but how we down there must look from Hungry Hill… Petty and insignificant, little ants running about our business. The Brodricks come and go, the men and women of Doonhaven marry, and give birth, and die, the mines make their song and their clatter for seventy-five years, and then are silent again. It's all one to the fairies and the ghosts of Hungry Hill. One day I'll make a picture of it, or if I'm too lazy perhaps John-Henry will.

But whatever happens in this country of ours the hill remains undefeated. He has the laugh on all of us."

He began walking away from the lake, eastward across the shoulder of the mountain, towards the mines. He had lunched early, and had walked all afternoon alone, in a mood of nerviness and strange unrest which he could not explain, even to Jinny.

His father was to be in Doonhaven tomorrow… He would see him, touch his hand, talk to him-his father, whom he had not seen now for fifteen years, not since he had walked out of his house when he was twenty years old. So many letters that had remained unwritten from Canada, conceived during his most lonely moments, but never put down on paper. Letters from Doonhaven too, that had come to his thoughts but not to his pen.

Descriptions of the mines, tales of Jinny and the boy. And always the silence between them, always the reserve. It was to be broken at last, and he had a great fear in his heart that the meeting would be a failure. They would stand in front of one another, tongue-tied, awkward, alike in so many ways, different in too much, and then his father would break the silence with that old forced, half-jocular tone that he had used many years ago to his schoolboy son, saying "Well, Hal… how are you, and how's the painting, eh?"

The answer would be the same, clumsy and shy, dragged from him reluctantly, "All right, thanks," and then his father, waiting a moment for more and being disappointed, would turn to Tom Caliaghan and be relieved because his presence eased the restraint between them.

His father… He would look perhaps with pity on Jinny, who from shyness would show herself too eager, too anxious to please. John-Henry would be produced, and his quiet, silent charm would not be in readiness for the occasion, a baby tantrum at being dressed in his best would have given him a sullen, obstinate air.

He would turn away from his grandfather and bury his head in a cushion. The encounter would be a failure from every point of view. As he walked Hal became angry.

Why should his father come suddenly, after all these years, and make a disturbance of the routine? He had business in Slane, he said in his letter to Uncle Tom-the sale of property in the city, and some matters to do with shipping and the mining company that needed adjustment.

The mines… Yes, thought Hal, let him come and inspect the mines and see the smokeless stacks and the smashed machinery, the heap of rubble, the general air of desolation. Let him talk to Mrs.

Connor, who had her fifth baby the week after the mines were closed down, and no money in the house, and poor Tim Connor lying drunk in the street at Doonhaven because they wouldn't give him and his family a passage to America.

There was plenty for his father to see. He did not have to worry, he did not have to put his hand in his pocket.

It was not his fault. No, he had got out of the affair like the shrewd, clever business man he was, just before the market struck rock-bottom. He could look at the families, and the stricken mine, and fellows like Jim Donovan who roamed the countryside with murder in his heart, and then go back to his house in Brighton and to Adeline, and live in comfort and security. The tenants would continue to pay their rent to a landlord they never saw, and the mould and the damp would eat the walls of Clonmere. It would not matter to Henry Brodrick. Hal had crossed the shoulder of the hill, and now stood on the ride above the deserted mine. Below him were the dressing-sheds and the tall boiler-house chimney. Someone had lit a fire of the rubble that lay before the boiler-house. The smoke rose in the air, black and foul, and coming down closer, Hal could see a crowd of men laughing and talking through the smoke, throwing bits of refuse and broken timber on to the fire to increase the blaze.

One of them bore a great plank on his shoulder, torn from a bench in the counting-house, and hurled it amongst the rubble in the fire.

It was Jim Donovan. Hal climbed down over the heap of slack that lay behind the shaft and joined them.

"Some of that timber would come in handy during the winter, if you saved it," he said. "Why not make a stack of it instead of burning it now? Then you can come down in the colder weather and chop it up for your families."

One or two of the men hung back, looking to Jim Donovan for advice. He stared at Hal aggressively, his cap on the side of his head giving him a knowing, cock-sure expression.

"Good-evening to you, Mr. Brodrick," he said.

"And you just having a stroll, I presume, round your father's ancient property, to see that no further damage is done to the place, and if it is, why you'll go and report it to the magistrate, no doubt, and have us poor fellows clapped into jail."

"I wouldn't do that, Jim," smiled Hal; "you ought to know me better. You can destroy all that's left of the mine, for all I care. But you might be glad of some of this stuff for fuel a bit later on."

Jim said nothing. His mouth had an ugly, sullen set to it, and he kicked a larger piece of timber into the fire.

"I hear Mr. Griffiths is going up north to live," he said. "They say he has a house across the border waiting for him. And then he has the cheek to tell us he knew nothing about the mines being closed. The fellow's a liar."

"Shame to him for it, then," said another, "putting furniture in it as cool as you please, all these past four months, and us poor fellows as ignorant as babies. You'd say there was no justice in the world."

"Nor is there," said Jim Donovan fiercely, "except when you take the law into your own hands. As for Mr. Griffiths, he's welcome to his fine house, for all I care. But I tell you I'd like to wring his neck, and all the rest of them that's deceived us."

His voice had risen, and he moved closer to Hal, his fists clenched, His friends murmured in approval, closing in behind him.

Poor devil, thought Hal; he's had a couple down at the pub in Doonhaven, and it's got him on the raw, instead of laying him out quiet and peaceful.

"All right, Jim," he said, "curse old Griffiths if you want to, but he's had no hand in the business, I promise you. He knew no more about it than I did, and that's a fact."

Someone whistled in derision, and another man laughed.

"Ah, laugh away," said Jim Donovan.

"Mr. Brodrick is like the rest of the gentlemen, smooth-faced and easy-spoken. It's him that is laughing at us all the time. So you didn't know the mines were to be closed, Mr. Brodrick? And when your father sold them to the London company, that was news to you too, I'll be bound? We know a bit more than that, I can tell you. We know you were go-between all the while, through from Mr. Griffiths to your father and the London company. Why, didn't you have the letters running through your hands day after day, from Slane and London and Bronsea, besides those that you get at home? I may be the son of a poor man, Mr.

Brodrick, who has only a few pigs and cows grazing on a piece of ground as big as my hand, when in days gone by we owned all the land hereabouts that your father holds now, but by all the blessed saints in heaven I'm not such a fool as I look."

He turned round on one foot, to survey the effect of his speech upon his companions.

"That's right, Jim," said one of the men, "you have the heart of a lion, I'm always telling you."

Hal shrugged his shoulders. He was suddenly bored by them, and their deliberate misunderstanding of the position.

It was useless to argue with a fellow like Jim Donovan anyway. He was tired now after his long tramp on Hungry Hill, and wanted Jinny, and his supper, and his bed before facing his father the following day.

"Goodnight," he said shortly, and turned away, making for the cinder track that led down to the high road. But Jim Donovan and his friends followed close at his heels.

"Not so fast, Mr. Brodrick," said Jim.

"Maybe the lads and I haven't finished talking with you yet. There's many an account to settle between our families, going back over the years. Wasn't it my own first cousin that was murdered by your father and your mother, travelling home in their carriage after a banquet, the horses whipped on to him by the coachman, and my poor cousin's brains spattering the road, and them driving on with never a care for him? It was common knowledge they were glad to see him dead, for the scandal your uncle brought upon his sister."

Hal looked over his shoulder at the angry man.

"For the Lord's sake, Jim," he said, "go home and get to bed and sleep off your temper. Take him off, some of you fellows, or carry him there, if he can't walk. I'm in no mood to start a quarrel about my uncle or my father or anyone else."

The men stared at him without answer, and Hal moved off down the cinder track. He had walked scarcely half a dozen yards before a stone struck the side of his head. It was a sharp, jagged stone, breaking the skin. Hal turned round to face his assailant, and another stone caught him above the eye.

"You damned fool," he shouted. "What the hell do you think you're doing? If you want to fight, come on, and I'll fight you fair."

He ran up the path towards Jim, his temper thoroughly roused, the blood pouring down his head from the jagged stone. He was met by an avalanche of stones that brought him to his knees, and the moment he was down the men rushed upon him, shouting, excited, one seizing his arm and twisting it behind his back so that he could not hit out at them, one or two of the others throwing themselves upon his body.

"Drag him down to the road and let him lie there, like your cousin," said one, and "Burn him in the fire," shouted Jim, "let him feed the flames."

Someone tied a handkerchief round his eyes, hard and tight, and the blood from the wound in his head began to trickle into his eyes, warm and sickly, and he could see nothing.

The men were shouting and laughing, and now some of them were seizing his arms, and the rest his legs, and bearing him away up the binder track to the fire by the dressing-sheds.

"You bloody idiots," said Hal, weak and faint from the mauling they had given him. "Do you want the whole country down upon you, and twenty years apiece at the Mundy Assizes?"

Someone hit him on the mouth-Jim Donovan no doubt-and then he was thrown face downwards in a heap of rubble, choking, suffocating, while his hands were bound behind him.

"Ah, leave him there to rot," said one of the men, "and come away home, Jim. We've had sport enough for one evening, haven't we?"

The sight of Hal lying in the rubble, dazed and half-conscious, made the men uneasy. Jim had led them into this, and now it was best to get away, and maybe put several miles between them and Doonhaven.

The sound of their voices grew fainter, and lying there in the rubble, Hal could hear the crunch of their boots as they climbed the heap of slack above him and made away across the hill. The blood went on trickling into his eyes behind the bandage, and even found its way to his mouth. He felt faint, and deadly sick.

The bonfire died away beside him, and he could tell by the stillness and the silence that darkness was falling fast.

"Jinny will be worried," he thought. "She'll go round to the Rectory and get hold of Uncle Tom."

What an idiot he had been ever to talk to Jim Donovan and his friends. He should have turned back across the hill as soon as he saw them. A fat lot of use it had been showing sympathy with the silly bastards. Hal rolled over on to his side, and worked loose the piece of rope that bound his wrists together. Then he tore off the handkerchief they had placed across his eyes. He found, to his dismay, that he could not see at all. One eye was closed up entirely, from the cut above it, and the other was gummed with the clotted blood. He would have to find water to bathe his eye before he could make his way home, five miles or more in the gathering darkness. He struggled to his feet, and peered about him, trying to gain a sense of direction. There was water hard by, surely, close to the dressing-sheds, where the tin used to be washed, but with his closed eyes, and the murky evening light, he could not remember whether the sheds had been to the right or to the left of the heap of rubble where the men had thrown him. He moved forward slowly, his arms outstretched, and as he took step by step, faltering, as helpless as a blind man, he thought of his father arriving tomorrow morning in the steamer at Slane.

He would come down to Doonhaven and find his son in bed probably, with his eyes bandaged, and his body black and blue. And he would not believe the story of a fight on Hungry Hill, for twenty-five years of living across the water would have made him forgetful of the strange ways and crazy happenings of his own country, where men drank with one another one moment and fought the next, all because of something that happened before they were born. His father would be shown up to the bedroom by a shy and nervous Jinny, and he would see Hal lying against the pillows with two black eyes, and say to himself "A drunken brawl, of course; the girl is trying to hush it up." The thought of this, so typical and inevitable, made Hal laugh helplessly to himself, and he thought how impossible it was going to be to explain to his father what had happened. It would be simpler to let the matter rest, and for his father to continue thinking him useless, tipsy, and incompetent, staggering home in his cups on a Saturday night, as half the men in Doonhaven had done since the beginning of time.

Hal touched something with his hands, a rough, hard surface, like a brick wall, and he stumbled over a piece of planking at his feet.

God damn it all, he thought wearily. I'm nowhere near the dressing-sheds. This feels like the boiler-house wall-and he went forward, step by step, groping his way in the darkness. He felt himself getting lightheaded, and he was aware suddenly of a feeling of sadness, that somehow he had made a mess of his day on Hungry Hill, that should have brought him peace and quiet, and now it was going to end foolishly, like so many things in his life.

Jinny would worry about him, and so would Uncle Tom; they were going to be unhappy because of him.

Everything was dark, he could see nothing with his damned swollen, bleeding eyes, and surely he was not by the mines at all, not on Hungry Hill, but walking in the shadows of the new wing at Clonmere, a little boy again, trying to find his way to mamma's bedroom?

The door to the boudoir was close at hand, and if he opened it and stepped into the room he would go to the shutters and pull them aside, that had stood rusted so long with the damp, and mamma would be waiting for him on the balcony that she had never used.

The moon rose over the shoulder of Hungry Hill, he could feel the light of it, in his blindness, and he thought it was the lamp she had lit for him, and that she stood waiting for him by the open door. He turned to go to her, and the black shaft yawned at him as he went'.

Jinny dressed her boy with great care, and he did not protest because although he was barely two he understood that sadness had come upon them all, and if he pulled and tugged at his clothes he would make her unhappy. He sat on her lap while she drew on the clean white socks, and the black shoes with the buckles. Then she took out his new suit from its tissue paper. Bottle-green velvet, with lace collar and cuffs. She parted his hair on one side for the first time, brushing away the heavy, dark fringe.

She had a tear at the corner of her eye, and this made him sorrowful. There was nothing he could do. He looked away over her shoulder at the beaver hat that had been bought for him from the shops. He knew that it would be uncomfortable, and he did not want to wear it.

It was black, like his shoes, and like the dress she wore. Her pretty blue dress was hanging in the cupboard. When Jinny had finished dressing him she stood him up on a chair and looked at him, and he had the feeling that she wanted him to be bigger than he was. Then she smiled at him, although the tear was still in the corner of her eye.

"I'm proud of you, dear," she said, "you look very nice. And I want you to be very good, because we are going to see your grandfather."

He considered this a moment. The word was too long for him, but it had a meaning.

"Granpie?" he said slowly, his expression brightening.

"No, not Granpie," she said, "someone else, that you have not seen before. We are going up to Clonmere to see him."

This could be understood. Clonmere was the house with the balcony and the windows, where they went so often for their walks. And climbing down from the chair, he allowed the ugly beaver hat to be placed upon his head, and the elastic snapped tight under his chin.

They went downstairs to the hall, hand in hand, and outside in the road Patsy was waiting, with the pony and trap. John-Henry looked to see if the picnic-basket was to be put in the trap, but there was no nigh of it.

"Picnic?" he said, watching his mother's face, but she shook her head.

"No, son," she said, "no picnic today."

He accepted the statement, but it was strange to drive in the trap with Patsy unless food was taken, and Granpie came, with rugs, and sticks, and coats, and parasols. Perhaps the arrival of the trap was a tribute to his velvet suit and the black beaver hat.

As Jinny passed the study she glanced in through the door, and saw that the Rector was sitting at his desk.

"We're going," she said. Her voice was calm and steady.

Tom Callaghan turned round in his chair. His face was grave, but his deep-set eyes were tender as he looked at his daughter and the boy.

"I've told you," he said, "not to expect anything from him. He is hard and cold, Jinny, not the man you remember as a child, who laughed and smiled and was gay, like our dear Hal. The years have been heavy with him."

"I don't want anything from him," said Jinny.

"I only think it right that he should see John-Henry."

"Yes," said the Rector, "yes, I understand."

Then she went from the room, with the boy, and they climbed into the trap and drove through the village street up the hill and past the cottages at Oakmount, until they came to the long wall, and the gatehouse.

Young Mrs. Sullivan was standing at the entrance to the drive, and as the trap drove through she curtseyed to Jinny, who returned the gesture with a solemn little bow.

John-Henry sat stiff and straight beside her.

People did not curtsey to her as a rule. Another tribute to the velvet suit.

He glanced at her hands. She was wearing gloves, a thing she only did in winter, or when she went to church with Granpie on Sunday morning.

Down the drive bowled the trap, through the rough park-lands and the woods, and there was the creek to the left of them, and the castle standing on the high grass bank above them. There was smoke coming from one of the chimneys, and the windows in the old part of the house had been flung open. There was a carriage drawn up in the turn of the drive before the castle. There was luggage placed on the seat beside the driver. The front-door of the great hall, that Jinny had never seen open, was open now.

Jinny hesitated a moment, but custom was too strong for her, and in a low voice she bade Patsy drive to the side-door, in the old part of the house.

She was a little nervous now. She pulled at the boy's lace collar, and straightened his hat on his head. Something of her feeling communicated itself to the child, and he felt shy and uncomfortable; he wanted to stay in the trap with Patsy.

"No," she said firmly, "you must come with me. And I want you to shake hands very politely when you see your grandfather."

The side-door was open, but Jinny rang the bell. It clanged loudly, echoing in a passage far away. A servant came to the door-the valet, she supposed, who had travelled over from London with his master.

"Mrs. Brodrick?" he asked, and John-Henry saw his mother bow again.

The gesture pleased him. It was so full of dignity. He imitated her, nodding his head up and down, but she frowned, and he supposed it was something that only grown-up people were allowed to do.

The servant opened a door across the hall and showed them into a large room, a dining-room. The cloth had been removed, but there was a long strip of green baize down the centre of the table.

This is where we lunched that Christmas Day, thought Jinny, when I was sixteen and Hal was twenty…

The servant had kindled a small wood fire in the grate, for although it was August the weather was chill. There were two chairs before the fire. Jinny was uncertain whether she should sit or stand. She had expected that Hal's father would have been in the room, waiting for them. The door at the end of the room was open. She remembered that it gave on a passage leading to the new wing, and she wondered if he had gone through there, to the other part of the house. She went on standing before the fire-place, holding John-Henry by the hand, and the little boy looked about him with interest, and pointed to a picture on the wall. It was a young girl, with soft brown eyes and dark curling hair.

She wore a string of pearls round her neck.

"Yes," whispered Jinny, "she's very pretty."

Jinny turned to the other side of the fire-place and gazed at the portrait of Hal's mother. How like him she must have been! That same reserve, that silence for no reason. Then the boy tugged at her hand, and looking over her shoulder, she saw that Hal's father had come into the room. He was not the Henry Brodrick she remembered as a child, not the Henry of the pencil sketch in the study at the Rectory. He was thinner, much thinner, and his face had fallen away, that had been large and firm before. His hair was scarce on top, and nearly white. The mouth was narrow, and the eyes more prominent than she remembered. Then he came forward, holding out his hand.

"You are Jinny," he said, "and I haven't seen you since you were six years old."

She had been ready to stand on her dignity, to speak at once in defence of Hal, of all that had happened, to accuse Henry if need be of neglect, unkindness, hardness of heart, but at his words her antagonism went, her defences were stripped from her, and she saw that he was shy and uncertain, even as she was herself, and lonely too.

"Yes," she said, "I'm Jinny, and this is John-Henry."

The boy put up his hand, as he had been told to do, and looked then around him at the door, wishing they might go.

"Won't you sit down?" said Henry, pointing to the chair, and Jinny held the boy by her side, whispering to him to be still.

For a moment Henry did not speak. He glanced away from the boy to the wood fire in the grate.

"What are your plans?" he said.

"I shall go on living in Doonhaven, with father and mother at the Rectory," she said, "until it is time for John-Henry to go to school. Then, I don't know.

It will depend on many things."

"I suppose," said Henry, "that Tom would like him to be a parson?"

"I don't think so," said Jinny. "Once, when I was talking about the future, he said that the Navy would be an excellent thing for John-Henry. But we needn't think about it yet."

There was a moment's pause.

"And Hal?" said his father. "Did he have any ideas on the subject?"

Jinny held the boy's hand, which was fidgeting with the lace collar.

"No," she said gently. "Hal was not interested in education, or professions. He just imagined that-that one day John-Henry would live here at Clonmere."

Henry rose to his feet, and stood with his hands behind his back, looking down on Jinny and his grandson, "I wanted to sell the place," he said, "many years ago. Hal will have told you that. I would still sell it, but, as you probably know, Clonmere is entailed. When I die, and this boy reaches the age of twenty-one, he can do as he likes. He can break the entail at will."

"Yes," said Jinny.

Henry walked slowly up and down the room.

"Property is a burden these days," he said.

"There is not the value in it that there used to be.

We're soon going to enter upon a new century too, and things are changing fast. This country may be slower to change than most, I don't know about that.

I've lived away too long either to know or to care."

He spoke without bitterness, but his voice was sad, as though, since he had looked upon his home, the past had risen up and closed upon him.

"Will you never come back to live here again?" said Jinny.

"No," he said, "no, that's all finished and done with."

He turned and faced her, his hands behind his back, his head a little on one side. That is how Hal used to stand, she thought. He had been part of him after all, a very great part, he had not belonged entirely to his mother.

"The mines are gone," he said; "they were the great link with this country. They brought good fortune to my family, but I doubt if they brought happiness. That is one of the reasons that I sold them, not to be quit of a bad debt, as most people believe. Now only the house remains, and if you and the boy want to live here, you are welcome to do so. There won't be any money for the upkeep though, not until I die. And I don't propose spending a penny on it in the meantime."

Jinny flushed. This was the Henry her father had warned her about. The business man, who sought first his own interests, or rather those of the wife at his back across the water, and was not likely to put his hand in his pocket for anyone else, not even his own grandson.

"It would be rather too big," said Jinny, "for me and John-Henry alone. Living close by, at the Rectory, we can come here often, and later on, when he is older, he will understand that one day it will belong to him."

It seemed to her that he looked upon her strangely, and with pity, and she held the boy's hand tightly, as though the firmness of his touch gave her strength and consolation.

"This is the third generation of my family," he said, "to be brought up by one parent only. You have lost Hal. I lost my Katherine. And my mother lost her John, when he was only a year or so older than your Hal. You will find it is not easy, for the one who is left…?

"No," said Jinny, "it will not be easy. But I love John-Henry, and I am not afraid."

He looked away from her, up at the portrait of Katherine on the wall. Then, very slowly, he put his hand inside his waistcoat pocket, and drew out a small round leather case. He held it a moment in his hands, and then snapped the clasp. He took from the case a replica of the portrait on the wall, in miniature. The likeness was well done, although the colouring was a little smudged in places, and the hair brighter than in reality.

"I have not shown this to anyone else," said Henry, "and I never shall. Hal did it for me, when he was a lad… He gave it me the night I brought Adeline back to London with me, and I rather think I never thanked him for it. You see, we were both a little shy of one another."

Jinny held the miniature, and then gave it back to Henry. He replaced it carefully in the leather case, and put it in his pocket.

"I've carried it now for twenty-one years," he said, "and Adeline has never discovered it."

A ghost of a smile appeared on his lips, and in a flash Jinny saw the gay, laughing Henry that once had been, the young man who stood beside her father in the university group.

"You won't give me away to anyone, will you?" he said.

Jinny shook her head.

He turned once more, and looked out of the window at the grass bank sloping to the creek. The sun shone upon a strip of carpet at his feet, and the myriad dust particles danced in a beam of light.

"You are fortunate in having Tom and Harriet for parents," said Henry. "They will take care of you and this boy, and you won't be alone. Hal's allowance will automatically come to you now, of course, you realise that. And when I die, as I told you before, the child has everything."

He glanced down dubiously at the small, solemn figure in the bottle-green velvet suit. "An empty house, and a load of doubts and dreams-not much of a legacy," he said.

John-Henry leant against his mother, and tugged at her hand, his signal that he wished to go. He did not care greatly for the strange man who looked down at him with pity, and he wanted to be back at the Rectory, with Granpie, amongst familiar things that he knew and understood.

"He's had enough of me," said Henry, with a smile.

"All right, young man, I won't keep you any longer. I am going too."

He walked with them to the hall. The luggage had been put in the carriage, the valet was standing in his hat and coat by the open door.

"It's a mistake," said Henry, "to walk back into the past. Look forward always, if you can."

He gazed up at the house, the barred windows of the new wing, the iron balcony above the door. Then he shook hands with Jinny, and touched the boy lightly on the head. He climbed into the carriage, and the servant slammed the door, taking his seat on the box beside the driver.

"I want you to say goodbye to Tom and your mother for me," said Henry. "I won't see them again. Ask Tom whether he remembers saying to me over thirty years ago, "I would rather be good like the Eyres than clever like you Brodricks'? The trouble is that goodness dies, and lies buried in the earth. Cleverness passes on and becomes degenerate."

He looked for the last time at the stone walls of the castle, and down across the sloping grass to the creek, and Doon Island, and the grey mass of Hungry Hill. Then he smiled once more at Jinny.

"You never knew my mother, did you?" he said.

"She died many years ago in Nice. The last words she ever said to me were, "Don't look serious, Henry boy. Thinking never did anybody any good." I don't know if she was right or wrong, but thinking always brought me pain. You can tell that story to your son, when he comes into his legacy."

He gave an order to the driver, and lifted his hat, and the carriage bowled away down the drive, and disappeared amongst the belt of trees. As it passed into the woods the herons rose from their nests in the tall branches, and went crying down the creek towards Doon Island.