The Squire's eyes followed the three distant walkers, Elizabeth, graceful and vigorous, between the other two. And the conviction gripped him that all the pleasure, the _liveableness_ of life--such as still remained possible--depended for him on that central figure. He looked back on his existence before her arrival at Mannering, and on what it had been since. Why, she had transformed it! How could he cage and keep her?--the clever, gracious creature! For the first time in his life he was desperately, tremulously humble. He placed no dependence at all on his name or his possessions. Elizabeth was not to be bought. But management--power--for the things she believed in--_they_ might tempt her. He would give them to her with both hands, if only she would settle down beside him, take a freehold of that chair and table in the library, for life! He looked back gloomily to his clumsy proposal about her mother, and to her remarks about Pamela. It would be indeed intolerable if his children got in his way! The very notion put him in a fever. If that tiresome fellow, Dell, had not interrupted them the night before, what would have happened? He had all the consciousness of a man still in the prime of life, in spite of his white hair; for he had married at twenty-one, and had never--since they grew up--seemed to himself very much older than his elder children. He had but a very dim memory of his wife. Sometimes he felt as if, notwithstanding the heat of boyish passion which had led him to marry her, he had never really known her. There were moments when he had an uncomfortable suspicion that for some years before her death she had silently but irrevocably passed judgment upon him, and had withdrawn her inner life from him. Friends of hers had written to him after her death of beautiful traits and qualities in her of which he himself had known nothing. In any case they were not traits and qualities which appealed in the long run to a man of his pursuits and temperament. He was told that Pamela had inherited some of them. A light rustling sound in the wood. He looked up to see Elizabeth coming back towards him unaccompanied. Captain Dell and Sir Henry seemed to have left her. A thrill of excitement ran through him. They were alone in the depths of the spring woodland. What better opportunity would he ever have? CHAPTER XIV Elizabeth was coming back in that flushed mood when an able man or woman who begins to feel the tide of success or power rising beneath them also begins to remind himself or herself of all the old commonplaces about Fate or Chance. Elizabeth's Greek reading had steeped her in them. 'Count no man happy till his death'; 'Count nothing finished till the end'; tags of this kind were running through her mind, while she smiled a little over the compliments that Sir Henry had been paying her.