That was after his mother’s death, of course, and after his eldest brother’s death, too; not that matters had ever been very grand at Beautiful End. Kit had never been a practical man at any time of his life, had never known the substance from the shadow or the business from the dream. He would be off playing his fiddle while crops waited and stock starved. Not but what he had played it rarely—everybody admitted that. There was not one of his sons but was proud of his gift, however awkward the moment of demonstration and the certainty of its cost. Even among themselves they allowed no criticism of his method of life, and certainly they never allowed it from anybody else. They had the strong filial feeling natural to their breed, and, added to that, a vague sense of something helpless and wonderful entrusted to their care. Lacking the gift on their own account, they yet shared an artistic strain which bade them pay tribute to the glamour, and worship, if they could not follow, the gleam. They had no quarrel with music if there was also daily bread. It was only that farming and suchlike didn’t agree. Perhaps things might have been better if Kit had gone to a new spot instead of following his father on the farm where he was bred. For once, in the shock of change, he might have seen both place and life in a practical light, and begun, at least, on normal, practical lines. But on the marsh, where he had dreamed as a lad, and which he had never left, he had never had even the vestige of a chance. For him it was saturated with wonderment, tuned to the first magic of his fiddle, set in the light that never was on sea or land. It was impossible for him to reduce his particular enchantment to sound commercial terms. The place wasn’t even real to him in the sense that it was real to others. It was the land of faery, and he had never come out of that land until—well, if the truth were known, he had never really come out. Spiritually, he had gone on living as he had lived as a youth. Life had not altered for him even when he succeeded to the farm, except that the rent which had stood in his father’s name now stood in his own.