He sought it that evening by a painful path. Jasper Musk and Sir Wilton Gleed were not friends; they had not spoken for years. Sir Wilton had not been long in the parish before he discovered that Musk had "cheated" him over the Flint House. The word was much too strong; but some little advantage had no doubt been taken. The quarrel had lasted to the present time; but Sir Wilton had often felt that Musk must hate the common scourge even more bitterly than he did himself, and that he would be a very valuable ally. He was a strong man and solid, the one powerful peasant in the neighbourhood. Unfortunately, sciatica had bound him to his chair from the very day of his daughter's funeral. It would have been comparatively easy to accost the old fellow in the open, and to disarm him with instantaneous expressions of sympathy and of indignation. It was more difficult for the lord of the manor to knock at the door of an enemy who was not a tenant--a door opening on the very street, and a door that might be slammed in his face for all Long Stow to see or hear. So Sir Wilton went after dinner, on a dark night; was admitted without demur; and stayed till after eleven. Next day he went again; he was also seen at the village constable's; and the village constable was seen at the Flint House; and Sir Wilton happened to call once more while he was there. The afternoon was rich in developments, and duly murmurous with theory, prophecy, speculation. The schoolmaster was summoned from the school, the saddler from his bench: it was the latter who fetched Tom Ivey from the room that he was adding to his mother's cottage at Sir Wilton's expense. Meanwhile the village whisper became loud talk; but its arrows, shot at a venture, flew wide of any mark. For through all his dark disgrace, as now when the odium attaching to him was gathering like snow on a rolling snowball; from the night of the fire to this eighteenth day of August; there was one thing of which Robert Carlton had never been suspected by those who had loved or feared him for a year and a half. Naturally the excitement penetrated to the hall, where Sir Wilton kept dinner waiting, but, very properly, did not refer to the unsavoury subject at that meal. He was, however, in singularly high spirits, and drank a vast amount of excellent champagne; yet his own wife left the table in ignorance of what had happened. Now Lady Gleed was a very particular person, a great stickler for restraint, her own being something strenuous and exotic. She seldom spoke of ordinary things above a whisper, and would have dealt with the village scandal in dumb show if she could. To her daughter she had genuinely preferred never to mention it at all.