From that moment Heathcote Mountford’s position was changed. He felt it before he had gone up the stairs, reverently following that which now he no longer addressed with encouraging human words, but felt to be the unapproachable and solemn thing it was. A man had ridden off for the doctor before they entered the house, but there was no question of a doctor to those who now laid their old master upon his bed. ‘I should say instantaneous, or next to instantaneous,’ the doctor said when he came; and when he heard of the few groans which had followed the fall, he gave it as his opinion that these had been but unconscious plaints of the body after all sense of pain or knowledge of what was happening had departed. The horse had put his foot into a hole in the spongy wet turf--a thing that might have happened any day, and which it was a wonder did not happen oftener. There were not even the usual questionings and wonderings as to how it came about, which are so universal when death seizes life with so little warning. Mr. Mountford had been in the habit of riding with a loose rein. He had unbounded confidence in his cob, which, now that the event had proved its danger, a groom came forward to say by no means deserved his confidence, but had two or three times before stumbled with its rider. Heathcote felt that doctors and grooms alike looked to himself with something more than ordinary courtesy and respect. He walked away from the comfortable bedroom now turned into a solemn presence chamber, and all its homely uses intermitted, with a gravity he had not felt before for years. He was not this man’s son, scarcely his friend, that his death should affect him so. But, besides the solemnity of the event thus happening in his presence, it changed his position even more than if he had been St. John Mountford’s son. It would be barbarous to desert the poor women in their trouble; but how was he to remain here, a comparative stranger, their kinsman but their supplanter, become in a moment the master of the house in which these girls had been born, and which their mother had ruled for twenty years. He went to his room to change his wet and soiled clothes, with a sense of confusion and sadness that made everything unreal to him. His past as well as that of his kinsman had ended in a moment; his careless easy life was over, the indulgences which he had considered himself entitled to as a man upon whom nobody but Edward had any special claim. Now Edward’s claims, for which he had been willing to sacrifice his patrimony, must be put aside perforce. He could no longer think of the arrangement which an hour ago he had been talking of so easily, which was to have been accomplished with so little trouble. It was in no way to be done now. Actually in a moment he had become Mountford of Mount, the representative of many ancestors, the proprietor of an old house and property, responsible to dependents of various kinds, and to the future and to the past.