There were hard words between father and son when the young man went back to the Water House with a B.A. degree, and a sheaf of bills on a more tremendous scale than usual. His mother’s estate had been settled upon Christian the younger, and beyond those paternal reproaches, he suffered very little from his extravagance. His majority, which had been wisely, or unwisely, deferred to his twenty-fifth birthday, would make him independent. He stayed a month or so at the Water House--shot on the moors--read late of nights in the sombre library--dined out very often, and saw as little of his father as was consistent with occupation of the same house. After this brief experience of domestic life he went off to the Continent, and remained there roaming from city to city, for the next ten years of his life, his father living on quietly at the Water House all the time, eating and sleeping and riding his steady cob, and generally taking care of himself in an eminently respectable and gentleman-like manner. In the tenth year of his son’s absence the father died suddenly of apoplexy--a catastrophe which seemed to most people in Little Yafford the natural close of a selfish, self-indulgent life. Christian appeared at the Water House in time for the funeral, after travelling day and night for a week. He saw his father buried, he examined his father’s papers in Mr. Scratchell’s presence, and he perused his father’s will drawn by Scratchell, and leaving everything to ‘my only son, Christian Harefield.’ The will had been made directly after Mrs. Harefield’s death, when Christian the younger was still at Eton; and although the father and son had not got on particularly well together afterwards, Christian the elder had not troubled himself to alter his bequest. He was too essentially selfish to leave a shilling away from his own flesh and blood. Christian had not treated him well, but Christian was in some wise a part of himself; and although he did not care much for Christian, there was nobody else for whom he cared at all.