“It seems to me, somehow, as if there was a kind of balance kept up in this world between good and evil, like the debtor and creditor sides of a ledger. I put down my uncle Oliver’s fortune on one side, and it looks as if I was the luckiest fellow in Christendom. But there’s the loss of poor little Susy must go down on the other side, and then the book looks altogether different. The loss of her--yes, the loss--that’s the word! If the earth had opened and swallowed her up, she couldn’t seem more lost to me than she is.” The passengers of the “Electric” had recruited themselves by this time, and a fresh pair of horses had replaced the tired animals who now stood steaming in the great stable-yard. The coach rolled slowly off, along a road that lay straight before the windows of the Crown--a road that crept under the steep slope of a thickly wooded hill, defended by an old crumbling wall, which, even in its decay, was grander and stronger than any modern wall that ever girdled a modern gentleman’s estate. The dark-red brick wall, and all the sombre woods above it, belonged to the Marquis of Landresdale, upon whose mansion and estate the little town or village of Landresdale was a kind of dependant, the inhabitants being almost all of them supported indirectly or directly by the patronage of the great man and his household. By these simple people the Cornish nobleman was spoken of with awe and reverence as the “Marquis;” and that the world held any other creature with a claim to that title was a fact utterly ignored--it may be, even discredited--by the ratepayers of Landresdale. Under the shadow of Landresdale House they were born and lived; and in a church which was only a kind of mausoleum for the departed nobles and dames of the house of Landresdale they worshipped every sabbath-day, until in the minds of some hero-worshippers, the figure of the Marquis grew into a giant shape that blotted out all the world beyond Landresdale. “How familiar the old place seems to me, and yet how strange!” thought Francis Tredethlyn, as he stood at the window. “There’s Jim Teascott the cobbler over the way, sitting in the very same attitude he was in when I stopped at the corner below to take my last look at Landresdale. But the street seems as if it had dwindled and shrunk away into half the size it used to be; and I feel as strange--as strange as if I’d been dead and buried, and had come to life again after folks had forgotten all about me; even the very seasons are all wrong, somehow, to my mind, as they might seem to a man that had been lying dead ever so long.”