His buying of Abington Abbey had presented itself to him at first as no more than one of these small changes which made up his life. Although he had had it in his mind to buy a country house for some years past, he had not exerted himself to find one, partly for fear that it would reduce the necessary amount of change. The London house was never a tie. You could leave it whenever you wished to. But a country house would make claims. It might come to be irksome to have to go to it, instead of going here, there, and everywhere, and if you forsook it too much it might reproach you. Other people's country houses would never do that. But ownership had had an effect upon him that he would never have suspected. The feeling of home, which had hitherto centred entirely in his family, still centred there, but gained enormously in richness from the surroundings in which he had placed them. The thousand little interests of the place itself, and of the country around it, were beginning to close in on them and to colour them afresh; they stood out of it more, and gained value from their setting. His own interests in it, too, were increasing, and included many things in which he had never thought of himself as taking any keen interest. He did not, as yet, care much for details of estate management, and left all that to Worthing, who was a little disappointed that a man who filled a big position in the financial world was not prepared to make something of a hobby of what to him was the difficult part of his work, and ease his frequent anxieties about it by his more penetrating insight. But Grafton did not leave his bank parlour in Lombard Street on Friday afternoon in order to spend Saturday morning in his Estate Office in Abington. Nor did he go far afield for his pleasures. The nearest golf links worth his playing over, who was used to the best, were ten miles away, which was nothing in a car, but he preferred to send his guests there, if any of them wanted to play golf, and stay at home himself, or play a round on the nine-hole park course at Wilborough. He took interest in the rearing of game, but that was about the only thing that took him even about his own property. For the present, at least, in the spring and early summer the house and the garden were enough for him, and a cast or two in the lengthening evenings over one or other of the pools into which the river that meandered through the park widened here and there.