The ghost of a smile flickered across the valet’s staid features, but he did not answer. Mr. St. George looked at his watch. It still wanted half an hour to dinner-time. He felt in no humour for seeing either Osmond or his cousin till they should all meet at table. He would stroll as far as the little summerhouse on the Knoll, and look once more on a scene that he remembered so well. He put on a light overcoat and a soft hat, and, going leisurely downstairs, he went slowly through the picture-gallery and the conservatory, and let himself out by a side door into the grounds at the back of the house. Every step that he took was haunted for him with memories of the past. His heart was full of bitterness and resentment that Fate, as he called it, should have played with him at such a terrible game of cross purposes, and have ended by winning everything from him. “If I had never been brought up to look upon it as sure to be one day my own,” he said, “I could have borne to see it another man’s without regret. Pierre is right: I did dream and plan and say to myself that I would do this thing and that thing when the time came for me to be master here. And now I, Kester St. George, am nothing better than a pauper and a blackleg, and am here on sufferance—an invited guest under the very roof that ought in justice to be mine!” He took the winding path through the plantation that led to the summit of the Knoll. The summerhouse was unlocked as usual. He went in and sat down. The scene before him and around him was very pleasant to look upon, lighted up, as it was just then, by the fading splendours of an April sunset. The Hall itself, clasped tenderly round with shrubberies of softest green, lay close at his feet. Far and wide on either side stretched the Park, with its clumps of noble old trees that had seen generation after generation of the St. Georges come and go like creatures of a day, and still flourished unchanged. Away in the distance could be seen Highworth and other prosperous farms, all part and parcel of the Park Newton estate. “All this belongs of right to me,” muttered Kester to himself, as his eyes took in the whole pleasant picture; “and it would have been mine but for——” He did not finish the sentence even to himself, but the gloom on his face deepened, and for a few moments the unhappy man sat with drooping head, seeing nothing but some terrible picture which his own words had conjured up.