And, curiously enough, at this very moment up at the Hall the same experience was happening to Mr. Lester Carmody. Staring out of his study window, he gazed upon a world bathed in a golden glow: but his heart was cold and heavy. He had just had a visit from the Rev. Alistair Pond-Pond, and the Reverend Alistair had touched him for five shillings. Many men in Mr. Carmody's place would have considered that they had got off lightly. The vicar had come seeking subscriptions to the Church Organ Fund, the Mothers' Pleasant Sunday Evenings, the Distressed Cottagers' Aid Society, the Stipend of the Additional Curate and the Rudge Lads' Annual Summer Outing, and there had been moments of mad optimism when he had hoped for as much as a ten-pound note. The actual bag, as he totted it up while riding pensively away on his motor-bicycle, was the above-mentioned five shillings and a promise that the squire's nephew Hugo and his friend Mr. Fish should perform at the village concert next week. And even so, Mr. Carmody was looking on him as a robber. Five shillings had gone--just like that--and every moment now he was expecting his nephew John to walk in and increase his expenditure. For just after breakfast John had asked if he could have a word with him later on in the morning, and Mr. Carmody knew what that meant. John ran the Hall's dairy farm, and he was always coming to Mr. Carmody for money to buy exotic machinery which could not, the latter considered, be really necessary. To Mr. Carmody a dairy farm was a straight issue between man and cow. You backed the cow up against a wall, secured its milk, and there you were. John always seemed to want to make the thing so complicated and difficult, and only the fact that he also made it pay induced his uncle ever to accede to his monstrous demands. Nor was this all that was poisoning a perfect summer day for Mr. Carmody. There was in addition the soul-searing behaviour of Doctor Alexander Twist, of Healthward Ho. When Doctor Twist had undertaken the contract of making a new Lester Carmody out of the old Lester Carmody, he had cannily stipulated for cash down in advance--this to cover a course of three weeks. But at the end of the second week Mr. Carmody, learning from his nephew Hugo that an American millionaire was arriving at the Hall, had naturally felt compelled to forego the final stages of the treatment and return home. Equally naturally, he had invited Doctor Twist to refund one-third of the fee. This the eminent physician and physical culture expert had resolutely declined to do, and Mr. Carmody, re-reading the man's letter, thought he had never set eyes upon a baser document. He was shuddering at the depths of depravity which it revealed, when the door opened and John came in. Mr. Carmody beheld him and shuddered. John--he could tell it by his eye--was planning another bad dent in the budget. "Oh, Uncle Lester," said John. "Well?" said Mr. Carmody hopelessly.