They had carried the old man as far as the kitchen sofa; spread a patchwork quilt over his limbs. In the scullery, Miss Tebbits was washing up: Peter could hear the trickle of water, the clink of crockery, as he stood gazing down on the gnarled happy face. “Thus, men should die,” thought Peter “not. . . .” Old pictures came crowding on his mind; he saw other faces, dreadful faces, faces of young men who should have been alive. . . . Charlie Tebbits, summoned from Arlsfield, stalked hatless into the room. “He was a good father,” said Charlie, “I’ve no complaint to make about him.” Peter wanted to get away, to leave these two alone with their dead. He held out his hand to Charlie. “I’m sorry.” The man gripped it. “He always liked you, sir.” Harry followed him out of the kitchen. They walked slowly down the flag-path to the gate. Peter held out his hand again. “See you tomorrow Harry.” The giant fidgeted for a moment; his blue eyes under the golden brows gazed straight into Peter’s. “Father said,” began Harry, “that if anything happened to him we was to tell you about that lease.” “What about it?” asked Peter wonderingly. “Father didn’t like signing that lease,” went on Harry. “He didn’t ought to have signed it neither. That Henley solicitor fellow, he was altogether too sharp. And father got angry with him.” It took half-an-hour before Peter got to the bottom of matters. Apparently, the trouble lay not in the house itself, but in the paddock. House and orchard stood on a little patch of freehold ground—Tebbits’ property: but the paddock, like most of Tebbits’ land, was leasehold—and Tebbits’ lease (an old-fashioned contract) expired with old man Tebbits. “Well, I don’t see it matters,” said Peter finally. “You’ll keep the farm on, I suppose.” “If we can,” said Harry, pulling at his great moustache. “If we can, sir.” He clumped heavily back to the house. PART THIRTY-TWO END—OR BEGINNING? § 1 Rightly to understand what follows—which is the ending (or the beginning, according to standpoint) of romance—you must recall to memory that Peter the First, grandfather of our Mr. Jameson, who left the country for the town at the commencement of the great English manufacturing era about eighteen hundred and forty, tried his luck in the City of London, and ended his days on the tobacco-farm in Guanabacoa, Cuba; also Peter the Second, father of our Mr. Jameson, and founder of Jameson & Co., Lime Street. Nor must you quite forget Captain “Chips” Bradley, Tessa Bradley, and the exotic Hebraic strain of the Miraflores. For all these played their ghostly parts in the mind of their descendant as he walked that debatable paddock in the warm sunshine of a late May morning ten days after the death of old man Tebbits. . . .