For a long time he had steadfastly refused to be placed on the Commission of the Peace, and his old friend, Colonel Neville, had waxed very sore and disappointed thereat. For Dorrien of Cranston not to have his place among the judicial luminaries adorning the Wandsborough Bench was, in the gallant veteran's eyes, a thing simply unheard of in the annals of the county. Why, it was tantamount to a prediction of the family downfall. But Roland had stood firm, and the Colonel had taken the matter quite seriously to heart. Then all of a sudden, just as his friends had given up trying to persuade him, he had, of his own accord, expressed his willingness to serve, and the Colonel was overjoyed. But from the day of his appointment up till now he had only taken his seat on the bench three times, and then, either by accident or design, when there was a peculiarly light list of cases for adjudication. Moreover, his voice had been strenuously raised on the side of mercy, to the no small astonishment of those who had ever been wont to look upon his name as a convertible term for unbending severity. "A hard Dorrien" was how inferiors and dependents had been wont to speak of the heads of the family. "I don't think it exactly my line in life," he observed to Mr Curtis, the vicar of Cranston, in reply to that worthy's expostulation with him for his scant attendance at Petty Sessions, "to sit in judgment on a lot of poor devils who knock over a rabbit when they're half-starving. It doesn't seem a very ennobling kind of office to fill, does it?" "That's all very well, Mr Dorrien," had replied the vicar, who was a zealous attendant at the Wandsborough Bench, and not a little proud of his connection therewith. "But birth and station have their duties, you must remember, and if those who by virtue of these advantages are appointed to `execute justice and maintain truth' shrink from their responsibilities, why, it will soon be a bad thing for the country. For what is the country to do?" "Pay some fellow--one of the Great Unbriefed, for instance--to perform these onerous duties," was the reply, with a careless laugh, not wholly free from satire. "Plenty of sharp fellows in these hard times would jump at the billet, any one of whom would be quite as competent as we are collectively to fine Bill Gubbins ten shillings and costs for driving a horse and cart down the street when drunk and incapable, or to decide whether John Hodge or Tom Podge shall be adjudged to contribute towards the maintenance of Sarah Timms' latest hopeful. At any rate it doesn't strike me that the discharge of these elevating duties should be monopolised by `birth and station.'" To which the vicar, a fine, hard-headed Tory of the old school, had replied severely, that he feared his friend had become imbued with some of the Radical tendencies of the day.