After Mrs. McDermott’s departure from Pincote, life there slipped back into its old quiet groove—into its old dull groove which was growing duller day by day. The Squire had altogether ceased to see company: when any of his old friends called he was never at home to them; and on the score of ill health he declined every invitation that was sent to him. But it was not altogether on account of his health that these invitations were declined, because three or four times a week he would be seen somewhere about the country roads being driven out by Jane in the basket-carriage. There was another reason for this state of things—a reason to which his friends and neighbours were not slow in giving a name. The Squire in his old age was becoming a miser: that is what the said friends and neighbours averred. But to dub him as a miser was altogether unjust: he was simply becoming penurious for his daughter’s sake, as many other men are penurious for ends much more ignoble. He had, in fact, decided upon carrying out that modest scheme of domestic retrenchment of which mention has been made in a previous chapter, and the mode of living adopted by him now did undoubtedly, to many people, seem miserly in comparison with that lavish hospitality for which Pincote had heretofore been noted. The Squire knew that he could not go much into society without giving return invitations. Now the four or five state dinners which he had been in the habit of giving every year were very elaborate and expensive affairs, and he no longer felt himself justified in keeping them up. Instead of spending so many pounds per annum in entertaining a number of people for whom he cared little or nothing, would it not be better to add the amount, trifling though it might seem, to that other trifling amount—only some few hundreds of pounds when all was told—which he had already managed to scrape together as a little nest-egg for Jane when he should be gone from her side for ever, and Pincote could no longer be her home? “If I had only died a year ago,” he would sometimes say to himself, “then Jenny would have had a handsome fortune to call her own. Now she’s next door to being a pauper.” Half his journeys into Duxley nowadays were to the bank—not to Sugden’s Bank, we may be sure, but to the Town and County—and he gloated over every five pounds added to the fund invested in his daughter’s name as something more added to the nest-egg; and to be able to put away fifty pounds in a lump now afforded him far more genuine delight than the putting away of a thousand would have done six months previously.