Berwick hated Chillingworth. When there he felt himself to be the unwelcome guest of the man who had built the huge place, and whose personality it seemed to express and to perpetuate, as houses so often do the personality of their builders. The creator of Chillingworth had been an acute early Victorian manufacturer, a worthy man according to his lights, and a pillar of the Manchester School. He had taken fortune at the flood, and his late marriage to a woman of slightly better birth and breeding than his own had produced the sickly, refined daughter whom Berwick had married. Chillingworth seemed plastered with money. Every room bore evidence of lavish expenditure; money spent on furniture, on pictures, on useless ornaments, during a period of our history when beauty seemed wholly in eclipse; and this was all the more pitiable because the house was gloriously placed on a spur of the down, and the views from its windows rivalled those of Chancton Priory. Even had Berwick wished to do so, he could not have made any serious alterations to the place, for the trustees of his marriage settlement were the very people, distant relatives of his wife's, whose children would benefit were he to forfeit his life interest in her fortune. To these people Chillingworth spelt perfection, and was a treasure-house of beautiful, because costly, objects of art. Occasionally, perhaps once in two years, its present owner would fill the great mansion for a few weeks with men and women--political acquaintances and their wives--to whom an invitation to James Berwick's Sussex estate gave pleasure, but otherwise he was little there, and the neighbourhood had long since left off wondering and exclaiming at his preference for Chancton Priory. * * * * * "If Miss Berwick sends over for a carriage, the French brougham which was used last night is not to go." "Very good, Sir." And then, after a short pause, "Anything wrong with the carriage, Sir?" "No. By the way, it may be required at Chancton. I have told Madame Sampiero that she may have the use of it for the lady who is staying there. Where's Dean?" Berwick, haggard-looking, and evidently in a mood which his servants knew and dreaded, was looking sharply round the stable yard. If he, the master, was up and about by nine o'clock, the morning after the Halnakeham Castle ball, then surely his coachman could be the same. "Dean's in trouble, Sir. He will be sending to ask if you can spare him to-day. Wife was taken ill last night, babby dead."