Alicia pronounced the word with gusto. It had been whispered to her that the squire of Fowey had spoken of her father--who counted his acres by thousands--as a squatter. That unimpeachable importance, founded upon the established respectability of bygone centuries--centuries in which men wore armour and women breakfasted on beef and ale--was not to be bought with gold and silver, and the want of it often made the Miss Crowthers angry. Diamonds they could have, and land, art, and beauty, even the ways and manners of good society, but they could not buy themselves a history. Everybody knew that their splendours had all come out of a cloth mill, that their ingots had been in some part transmuted from pestiferous woollen rags gathered in the Jewish quarters of far-off cities, ground into shoddy, and anon issued to the world as sleek superfine cloth. The more shoddy the higher interest upon capital; and Vansittart Crowther’s daughters knew too many of the secrets of the mills to be proud of the source of their prosperity. Mrs. Crowther was sorry to lose Isola as a friend and _protégée_. Her daughters were furious at the slight implied in this gradual dropping away. They passed Mrs. Disney and her sister-in-law with their noses in the air, as they went from the church-porch to their carriage. They cut them ostentatiously if they met on the quiet country roads. Mrs. Crowther would still stop to speak and shake hands, albeit she urged no further invitations. And while the gulf widened between the great house and the small one the glorious Cornish summer waned, and slowly, slowly, melted away, lingering very late in that fair western land, which was full of flowers even when the home counties were being withered and blackened by the first frosts. At last came winter, and the gradual turn of the year; short days slowly lengthening out by leisurely sunsets; pale snowdrops glimmering in the borders; and then the gold of crocuses and the bright blue of the Siberian bell-flower in patches of vivid colour; and then hyacinths and tulips, primroses on every bank, narcissus and jonquil in every garden; and by-and-by the full glory of bluebell and hawthorn blossom. And anon in the middle of May came an event in which all the interests of Colonel Disney’s life seemed to culminate. In that balmy Maytime Isola’s firstborn son came into the world, and Isola’s young life hovered at the gate of death, in so terrible an uncertainty that Martin Disney’s hair grew grey while he awaited the issue of the contest between youth and weakness. For more than a week after the birth of her baby Isola’s condition had satisfied the trained nurse and the kindly doctor. She was very white and weak, and she showed less interest in her baby than most young mothers--a fact which Mr. Baynham ascribed to over-education.