concern themselves should be utterly unimportant to the rest of the world. And by-and-by many voices seemed to wake up round him, and discuss him on all sides. ‘He has a very nice old place in the country, and a bit of an entailed estate--nothing very great, but lands that have been in the family for generations. Why doesn’t he go and look after it?’ He did not know if those words were really said by anyone, yet he seemed to hear them circling about his head, coming like labels in an old print out of the mouths of the men at his club. ‘Why doesn’t he look after his estate? Is there nothing to be done on his property that he stays on, leading this idle life here?’ It was even an object of surprise to his friends that he had not taken the good of the shooting or invited anyone to share it. He seemed to himself to be hunted out of his snug corner. The Albany was made unbearable to him. He held out as long as the ladies remained in Park Lane, but when they were gone he could not stand it any longer--not, he represented to himself, that it was on their account he remained in London. But there was a certain duty in the matter, which restrained him from doing as he pleased while they were at hand and might require his aid. They never did in the least require his aid--they were perfectly well off, with plenty of means, and servants, and carriages, and unbounded facilities for doing all they wanted. But when they went away, as they did in February, he found out, what he had been suspecting for some time, that London was one vast and howling wilderness, that the Albany was a hideous travesty of monasticism, fit only for men without souls, and lives without duties; and that when a man has anything that can be called his natural business in life, it is the right thing that he should do it. Therefore, to the astonishment and disgust of Edward, who liked to have his brother’s chambers to come to when he ‘ran up to town’--a thing less difficult then than in these days of stricter discipline--Heathcote Mountford turned his back upon his club and his hermitage, and startled the parish out of its wits by arriving suddenly on a rainy day in February at the dreary habitation which exercised a spell upon him, the house of his ancestors, the local habitation to which in future his life must belong, whether he liked it or not.