On his way home Octavius Buzzby found himself wondering, as he had wondered many times before on occasion, how he could checkmate this latest and most unexpected move on the part of the mistress of Champ-au-Haut. His mind was perturbed and he realized, while making an effort to concentrate his attention on ways and means, that he had been giving much of his mental strength during the last twenty years to the search for ulterior motives on the part of Mrs. Louis Champney, a woman of sixty now, a Googe by birth (the Googes, through some genealogical necromancy, traced their descent from Sir Ferdinando Gorges. The name alone, not the blood, had, according to family tradition, suffered corruption with time), and the widow of Louis Champney, the late Judge Champney's only son. The Champneys had a double strain of French blood in their veins, Breton and Flemish; the latter furnished the collateral branch of the Van Ostends. This intermixture, flowing in the veins of men and women who were Americans by the birthright of more than two centuries' enjoyment of our country's institutions, had produced for several generations as fine a strain of brains and breeding as America can show. Louis Champney, the last of the line in direct descent, was looked upon from his boyhood up as the culmination of these centuries' flowering. When, at forty, he died without having fulfilled in any wise the great expectations of his townspeople and relations, the interest of the community, as well as of the family, centred in the prospects of Louis Champney Googe, his namesake, and nephew on his wife's side. Here, again, numerous family interests as well as communal speculations were disappointed. The Champney estate was left entire to the widow, Almeda Googe Champney, to dispose of as she might deem fit. Her powers of administratrix were untrammelled save in one respect: Octavius Buzzby was to remain in his position as factotum on the Champney estate and adviser for its interests. It was at this juncture, when Louis Champney died without remembering his nephew-in-law by so much as a book from his library and the boy was ten years old, that a crisis was discovered to be imminent in the fortunes of the Googe-Champney families, the many ramifications of which were intricately interwoven in the communal life of Flamsted. This crisis had not been averted; for Aurora Googe, the sister-in-law of Mrs. Champney and mother of young Champney, sold a part of her land in The Gore for the first granite quarry, and in so doing changed for all time the character and fortunes of the town of Flamsted.