"Is the right-of-way dispute progressing?" said Magdalen to her father as the two men came up and stopped in front of them. Colonel Bellairs implied that it would shortly be arranged, as his intellect was being applied to the subject. Wentworth said emphatically, for about the thirtieth time, that the right of a footpath, or church path across the domain was well established and could not be set aside; but that whether it was also a bridle path was the moot point; and whether Colonel Bellairs was justified in his recent erection of a five-barred stile. (I may as well add here, for fear the subject should escape my mind later on, that at the time of these pages going to press the dispute, often on the verge of a settlement, had reached a further and acuter stage, being complicated by Colonel Bellairs' sudden denial even of a church path, to the legal existence of which he had previously agreed in writing.) Wentworth trod upon the crocus and said he must be going home. "We will walk back to the house with you," said Magdalen, and she led the way with her father. "I wish you would tell your Aunt Mary," he said to Magdalen as they walked on, "that I will not have her servants wandering in Lindley wood. Jones tells me they were there again last Sunday with a dog, that accursed little yapping wool mat of Aunt Aggie's! I simply won't stand it. I would rather you told her. It would come better from you." "I will tell her." Colonel Bellairs was beginning late in life to lean on Magdalen. She was fond of him in a way, and never yielded to him. _On ne peut s'appuyer que contre ce qui résiste._ Though Colonel Bellairs did not know it, he was always wanting to _s'appuyer_. He had found in his daughter something solid to lean against, which he had never found in his wife, who had not resisted him. "Oh! and look here, Magdalen. I had a letter from your Aunt Mary this morning, a long rigmarole. She says she is following her letter, and is coming to have a serious talk with me. Hang it all! Can't a man have a moment's peace?" Colonel Bellairs tore out of an inner pocket a bulky letter in a bold, upright hand, marked _Private_, at the top. "I wish to the devil she would mind her own business, and let me manage mine," he said pettishly, thrusting the letter at Magdalen. "I don't like to read it, as it is marked 'Private.'" "Read it. Read it," said Colonel Bellairs irritably. Magdalen read the voluminous epistle tranquilly from beginning to end as she and her father walked slowly back to the house. It was an able production, built up on a solid foundation. It dealt with Colonel Bellairs' "obvious duty" with regard to the man to whom Magdalen had been momentarily engaged fifteen years before, and who, owing to two deaths in the Boer war, had unexpectedly succeeded to an earldom.