"Well, it isn't beautiful," he replied, without turning his head. "Do you care much about it, Miss Strange? Why should anybody care about it? There are wonderful places in the world--beautiful places full of sunshine. Why should we trouble ourselves about this little grey and green island where we happened to be born? And what are these few acres in it more than any other bit of ploughed land and meadow?" "I thought you didn't care for it," said Barbara, sagely. "I thought you scorned it." "Scorn it--I can't scorn it! It isn't mine!" He turned away from it, as if in a sudden movement of impatience, and lounged with his back to the gate. "It's like my luck!" he said, kicking a stone in the road. Barbara was interested. Harding's tone revealed the strength and bitterness of his feelings. He had never seemed to her so much of a Rothwell as he did at that moment. "What is like your luck?" she ventured to ask. He jerked his head in the direction of Mitchelhurst. "I may as well be honest," he said. "Honest with myself--if I can! Look there--I have mocked at that place all my life; for very shame's sake I have kept away from it because I had vowed I didn't care whether one stone of it was left upon another. What was it to me? I am not a Rothwell. I'm Reynold Harding, son of Sidney Harding, son of Reynold Harding--there my pedigree grows vague. My grandfather is an important man--we can't get beyond him. He died while my father was in petticoats. He was a pork-butcher in a small way. I believe he could write his name--_my_ name--and that he always declared that his father was a Reynold too. But we don't know anything about my great-grandfather--perhaps he was a pork-butcher in a smaller way. My uncle Robert went to London as a boy and made all the money, pensioned his father, and afterwards educated his half-brother Sidney, who was twenty years younger than himself. He would have made my father his partner if he had lived. If my father had lived I might have been rich. As it is, I'm not rich, and I'm not a Rothwell." "Well, you look like one!" said Barbara. She was not very wise. It seemed to her a cruel thing that this earlier Reynold should have been a pork-butcher--a misfortune on which she would not comment. She looked up at the younger Reynold with the sincerest sympathy shining in her eyes, and in an unreasoning fashion of her own took part with him and with the old family, as if his grandfather were an unwarranted intruder who had thrust himself into their superior society. "You look like one!" she exclaimed, and Reynold smiled. "And after all," she said, pursuing her train of thought, "you are half Rothwell, you know. As much Rothwell as Harding, are you not?" He was still smiling. "True. But that is a kind of thing which doesn't do by halves."