"I hope so," he said. "Well, I would not trouble you with my schemes and plans, but for the fact that they indirectly concern you." She looked startled for a second; but he proceeded with a certain easy cheerfulness of manner which Käthchen thought became him; and he spoke in a confidential and friendly way, more than was his wont: "Yes; if what I am aiming at succeeds it will make your position here a good deal easier. I know the difficulties you have to contend with on an estate like this—the poverty of the soil—families growing up and marrying, and still clinging to the small homesteads—the distance from markets—the climate—and all that. And indeed my first scheme—my ideal scheme," he went on, in this frank kind of fashion, "was comprehensive enough: I wanted nothing less than to take away the whole of the population with me—not the surplus population merely, but the whole of the people bodily, leaving the sheep and the game in undisturbed possession. That would have made matters easy for you—and for Mr. Purdie. I thought I could carry them away with me to one of the colonies; and get a grant of Crown Lands from the Government; and be appointed to look after the settlement, so that I could live and die among those I have known from my childhood. There was only one point of the scheme that I was absolutely sure about, and that was that the people would go if I asked them—yes, to the very oldest. ’If I have to be carried on board the ship,’ one of them said to me——" "Have you considered—the terrible responsibility?" she said, in rather a breathless way.