As Sir Reginald spoke Lady Graves and her daughter entered the hall and greeted Henry warmly enough. His mother was a person of about sixty, still handsome in appearance, but like himself somewhat silent and reserved in manner. Trouble had got hold of her, and she showed it on her face. For the rest, she was an upright and a religious woman, whose one passion in life, as distinguished from her predilections, had been for her dead son Reginald. He was taken away, her spirit was broken, and there remained to her nothing except an unvarying desire to stave off the ruin that threatened her husband’s house and herself. The daughter, Ellen, now a woman of twenty-five, was of a different type. In appearance she was fair and well-developed, striking and ladylike rather than good-looking; in manner she was quick and vivacious, well-read, moreover, in a certain shallow fashion, and capital company. Ellen was not a person of deep affections, though she also had worshipped Reginald; but on the other hand she was swift to see her own advantage and to shape the course of events toward that end. At this moment her mind was set secretly upon making a rich marriage with the only eligible bachelor in the neighbourhood, Milward by name, a vain man of good extraction but of little strength of character, and one whom she knew that she could rule. It has been said that his welcome was warm enough to all outward appearance, and yet it left a sense of disappointment in Henry’s mind. Instinctively he felt, with the exception, perhaps, of his mother, that they all hoped to use him that he had been summoned because he might be of service, not because the consolation of his presence was desired in a great family misfortune; and once more he wished himself back on the quarter-deck of the _Hawk,_ dependent upon his own exertions to make his way in the world. After a somewhat depressing dinner in the great dining-room, of which the cold stone columns and distempered walls, decorated with rather dingy specimens of the old masters, did not tend to expansion of the heart, a family council was held in the study. It lasted far into the night, but its results may be summed up briefly. In good times the Rosham Hall property was worth about a hundred thousand pounds; now, in the depths of the terrible depression which is ruining rural England, it was doubtful if it would find a purchaser at half that amount, notwithstanding its capacities as a sporting estate. When Sir Reginald Graves came into possession the place was burdened with a mortgage of twenty-five thousand pounds, more or less. On the coming of age of his elder son, Reginald, Henry’s brother, the entail had been cut and further moneys raised upon resettlement, so that in the upshot the incumbrances upon the property including over-due interests which were added to the capital at different dates, stood at a total of fifty-one thousand, or something more than the present selling value of the estate.