John Gore had inherited these Yorkshire lands from his mother, who had been able to will them to him by right of title. Her marriage with Lord Gore had not been a happy one, for he had been too desirous of pleasing all women, while she was a lady of sweet earnestness who would have given her heart’s blood for a man—had he been worthy. Her character appeared to have mastered my lord’s, for her nature ousted his from the soul of their only child—a boy, John Gore. She had died in her Junetide while the lad was schooling at the great school of Winchester, leaving her property in trust for him till he should come of age. Shirleys, for such was the name of the manor-house and the park, had been leased to a city merchant, a man who had trudged to London as a Yorkshire lad, and driven out of it as Sir Peter in a coach-and-six. The farms and holdings were under the eye of a steward, Mr. Isaac Swindale, a lawyer at Tadcaster. The whole estate was worth a good sum yearly to John Gore, and it was with the money, therefore, that he had bought and fitted out the _Sparhawk_, and sailed in her as gentleman adventurer into strange seas. John Gore passed some days at Shirleys as Sir Peter Hanson’s guest, for his mother had died in the old house, and he had wished to see the place after the passing of three years. Perhaps his heart went out the more to the memory of that dead mother because she had taught him to reverence women, and given him that most precious thing that a man can have: the power to love deeply and with all the tenderness that makes love stronger even than death. The gardens and the walks were just as in his mother’s day, for John Gore had stipulated that nothing should be meddled with, and the flowering shrubs and the herb borders were there as she had left them. The spirit of the place seemed full of sympathy for him that September. Its memories had a restfulness that touched him even more than of old. For the thought of his mother bending her pale, serious face over the rose-bushes and the green ferns where the roach pool lay seemed more dear and vivid to him because of that other thing that had taken birth within his heart. He felt that he would have given much to have walked with his mother through those little coppices and the green aisles of the orchard where the Lent-lilies dashed the April winds with gold, and to have talked to her as a son can sometimes talk to a mother, even though he be a grown man with the tan of the wide world upon his face. So near did her spiritual presence seem to him that he would not go to kneel before the stately tomb in the chantry at the church, feeling that she lived in the place that she had loved, and not under that mass of alabaster and of marble that covered the mere dust.