As he looked upon the old manor house, high, square, and embattled, towering on its grassy steep above the haugh--that abode of so many memories, with all his pride in it, and pride of race and name, there came a stormy emotion, or sense of humiliation--even of rage, when he thought of the tenor or alleged tenor of that will, by which his father, in the senility of age (if all he heard were true), had degraded him to a cypher by leaving the estate entirely to an alien, to his second wife, who had been the artful companion of his first--to the exclusion of him--Roland, the heir of line and blood, save for such a pittance or allowance as she chose to accord him, for the term of his or her natural life, which, when the chances of war and climate were considered, was certain to exceed his own, his senior though she was in years. After all he had endured in the deserts by the Nile, hunger, thirst, suffering, sickness, and wounds, facing and enduring all that a soldier may since last he had looked on old, gray Earlshaugh, as memory went flashing back he strove to forget for a brief time the wrong his father had done himself and his sister Maude, and to think only of his happy boyhood, and all that had been then. Memories of his dead parents, of his gentle and loving mother, of his manly and fox-hunting father, who had taught him to ride, and shoot, and fish--of little brothers who lay buried by their side in the grave--of his childhood, of games, and old--or rather young--longings and imaginings, when the woods of Earlshaugh, and the trouting stream, were objects of vague mystery, the former peopled with fairies, and the latter the abode of a wicked kelpie! Many a living voice and loving face had passed away since then--vanished for ever; but the memories of them were strong and pathetic. The rooks still clamoured in the old trees, and the birds sang amid the shrubberies as of old; he heard the men whistling and singing in the stable-yard. In the fields the soil had a fresh and grassy odour in the noonday sunshine familiar to him; and he felt the conviction that though he in many a sense had changed, Nature had not--'for the wind blows as it will through all the long years, and the land wakes glad and fragrant at the kiss of the pale dawn, and plain daily labour goes on steadily and unheedingly from generation to generation.' As unnoticed and unseen he drew near the house--a massive old Scottish fortalice with tourelles at every angle--and surveyed its striking façade, he recalled the words of his uncle and Hester, and felt that he had now much that was practical to think about, much that was painful and dubious to forgive or submit to, while a vague sense of coming bitter annoyance--it might be humiliation, as we have said--rose before his haughty spirit, and the suspicion or emotion was not long of being put to the test.