‘I can’t understand why a man should be attached to the place where he was born,’ he used to say in his careless fashion when his cousins reproached him for his indifference. ‘In the first place, he doesn’t remember the event of his birth; and in the second, the locality is generally the most uninteresting in creation. Wherever you go, abroad or at home, you are always dragged about to see where particular people were born. You knock your head against the low timbers of Shakespeare’s birthplace at Stratford; you go puffing and panting up to a garret to see where Charlotte Corday was first admitted to the mystery of existence; you drive through Devonshire lanes to stare at the comfortable homestead where Kaleigh blinked at life’s morning sun; you mount a hill to admire the native home of Fox; you go stages out of your way to contemplate the cradle of Robespierre. And when all that a man loved in his boyhood lies under the sod, and the home where he spent his early life seems sadder than a mausoleum, people wonder that he is not fond of those empty rooms, haunted by the phantoms of his cherished dead, simply because he happened to be born in one of them.’ Thus had argued Mr. Hossack when his cousins reproached him with his want of natural affection for the scenes of his childhood. Hillersdon Grange was within three miles of Homefield, where Geoffrey’s father had ended his quiet easy life about ten years ago, leaving his only son orphaned but remarkably well provided for. Squire Hossack of Hillersdon was the elder scion of the house, and owner of a handsome landed estate, and the Miss Hossacks were those two musically-disposed damsels whom it had been Geoffrey’s privilege to escort to various concerts and matinees in the winter season last past. The letter now in Geoffrey’s hand was from the elder of the damsels, a hard-riding good-looking young woman of four-and-twenty, who kept her father’s house, domineered over her younger sister, and would have had no objection to rule Geoffrey himself with the same wise sway. Her letter was a new version of the oft-repeated invitation. ‘Papa says, if you don’t come to us this year, he shall think you have quite left off caring about your relations, and declares he really never will ask you again,’ she wrote. ‘It does seem a hard thing, Geoffrey, that you can go scampering about the world, and living in all manner of outlandish places—Stillmington, for instance, a place which I am told is abominably dull out of the hunting season, and what you can have found to amuse you all these months in such a place, I can’t imagine—and yet, excuse the long parenthesis, can’t find time to come to us, although we are so near dear old Homefield, which you must be attached to, unless your heart is much harder than I should like to suppose it. The birds are plentiful this year, and papa says there are some snipe in Dingley marsh. Altogether he can promise you excellent sport after the first of next month.