He was a man whose previous life had, to a considerable extent, belied his real character. He had lived idly and without any apparent ambition during these forty years, contenting himself apparently, for the last ten, with his dreary old manor-house and spare income. But this was not because he was of a light and easy temper, or satisfied with his lot. He was active enough in reality, now that he had affairs in his hands of sufficient magnitude to occupy him—and thoughtful enough to keep his purposes locked in his own heart, from which they came forth in act and deed, only when full fledged and ready for the gaze of the world. The house of Fontanel gradually recognised the hand of the master. Without any visible coercion upon Mary, the open, liberal, hospitable house came by imperceptible degrees under that stern regime which had made life possible at the manor-house upon the much diminished means of the Summerhayes’. The process was like nothing so much as the change of a ship’s course in a stormy sea. The vessel wavered, reeled for a moment as the helm went round in the new direction, but next minute had righted herself, and was ploughing steadily on in her new course, leaving the ignorant passengers below in total unconsciousness of anything that had happened, except that momentary stagger and uncertainty which it was so easy to account for. Mary was not cut down, either in her hospitalities or charities—or at least, if she was, did not know it; but before a year had elapsed, the expenditure in Fontanel house was smaller, and the expenditure on Fontanel estate greater than it had ever been in the memory of man. Mr Summerhayes was an enterprising and enlightened landlord. He took up the Home Farm with such energy that every tenant-farmer within twenty miles learned, or ought to have learned, the salutary lesson; and he gave loans and bonuses upon improvement, such as suggested to the unimproving sundry sarcasms as to the facility with which men parted with other people’s money. If it had been his own, instead of belonging to his wife and her children, it would have made a difference, people said; but then it was only the unprogressive, whom Mr Summerhayes decidedly snubbed and disapproved of, who made that ill-natured remark. To tell the truth, however, when he set out upon this active career, which was so unlike his former life, Mr Summerhayes of Fontanel became much less popular in the county than the poor squire at the manor had been in old days. Perhaps, in the change from poverty to wealth, he carried things with too high a hand. Perhaps he failed to recognise his own position as an interloper, and acted the master too completely to please the popular fancy. At all events, nobody was satisfied—not even his sisters in the old house, which they had all to themselves; certainly not the little community in his present home, which obeyed and feared and suspected him—perhaps not even his wife.