From that moment they practically lost sight of him. He sent the class list which contained his name among the Firsts to his father; in the same way he communicated the news of his Fellowship at Queen’s, his ordination and his appointment to the headmastership of a south-country grammar school. None of his communications were ever answered till, in the very last year of his father’s life, the eldest son, who had a shrewder eye all round to the main chance than the rest applied to ‘Dick’ for cash wherewith to meet some of the family necessities. The money was promptly sent, together with photographs of Dick’s wife and children. These last were not taken much notice of. These Leyburns were a hard, limited, incurious set, and they no longer regarded Dick as one of themselves. ‘Then came the old man’s death,’ said Mr. Thornburgh. ‘It happened the year after I took the living. Richard Leyburn was sent for and came. I never saw such a scene in my life as the funeral supper. It was kept up in the old style. Three of Leyburn’s sons were there: two of them farmers like himself, one a clerk, from Manchester, a daughter married to a tradesman in Whinborough, a brother of the old man, who was under the table before supper was half over, and so on. Richard Leyburn wrote to ask me to come, and I went to support his cloth. But I was new to the place,’ said the vicar, flushing a little, ‘and they belonged to a race that had never been used to pay much respect to parsons. To see that man among the rest! He was thin and dignified; he looked to me as if he had all the learning imaginable, and he had large, absent-looking eyes, which, as George, the eldest brother, said, gave you the impression of someone that “had lost somethin’ when he was nobbut a lad, and had gone seekin’ it iver sence.” He was formidable to me; but between us we couldn’t keep the rest of the party in order, so when the orgie had gone on a certain time, we left it and went out into the air. It was an August night. I remember Leyburn threw back his head and drank it in. “I haven’t breathed this air for five-and-twenty years;” he said. “I thought I hated the place, and in spite of that drunken crew in there, it draws me to it like a magnet. I feel after all that I have the fells in my blood.” He was a curious man, a refined-looking melancholy creature, with a face that reminded you of Wordsworth, and cold donnish ways, except to his children and the poor. I always thought his life had disappointed him somehow.’ ‘Yet one would think,’ said Robert, opening his eyes, ‘that he had made a very considerable success of it!’