Cleg had also been thinking much lately of developing the wild-flower business. He meant to establish an agency in each of the larger towns, and he had already written a letter to Cleaver's boy offering him terms as his agent and advising him to look out for openings. For Cleg was proving himself above all things practical, and seemed destined to turn out as prosperous a business man as Bailie Holden. The General often laughed at Cleg's devotion to his flowers and his children. Yet he liked to hear tidings of them. Sometimes, indeed, he reproved Cleg for bringing with him a floating atmosphere and suggestion of womankind. But Cleg always assured him that he had been careful to change his clothes. Life at Barnbogle went on uneventfully. Daily the time locks clicked. Daily the General retired to his strange bedroom, coming forth again with the pupils of his eyes dilated and his face drawn with the drugs which he had inhaled and swallowed. Cleg cooked the bacon, brewed the tea, and made a couple of daily pilgrimages to the room of the three coffins. Then he came out again and shut the doors carefully behind him, and slept soundly at nights. Cleg had no spiritual fears and had outgrown his illusions—at least such of them as interfered with a pound a week. But whenever he went into Netherby he found himself an object of great interest. For not even the peccadilloes of the ministers of Netherby, nor yet the unbecoming gaiety of their wives' attire, supplied so favourite a subject for gossip to the good folk of the town as the madness and the miserliness of General Theophilus Ruff. The old men would tell over again those tales of the General driving his coach and six with the lady by his side who was arrayed like the Queen of Sheba. Netherby had never had any doubt as to the fascinating moral character of this personage. And Theophilus Ruff still carried the glory of his former sins about with him, even though he had dwelt for twenty years a hermit and a madman in his house of Barnbogle. His fabulous wealth was everywhere a common topic. He received his rents in person, but none of it, so far as was known, was placed in the banks of the neighbourhood. The builders, the engineers, and the locksmiths from the city had, as we have seen, all told tales of the strong-rooms they had been erecting, and of the secret arrangements which had been made with a great firm in London for yet more complete safety. "It's a perfect Guid's wonder that ye are no a' murdered in your beds, wi' thae millions of siller lyin' in the hoose," said one of Cleg's most persistent inquisitors, after vainly trying to extract from Cleg whether he had ever seen the treasure with his own eyes.