Life at Knockholt Park had rolled on very smoothly on the whole, until the accident which recalled his son to his neglected home had befallen Sir Peregrine; and if the master of the fine old house and the fine old estate had had a good deal of loneliness, some bitterness, not a little wistful haggard remembrance and yearning regret, a sense of discordance where he longed for harmony, with a disheartening conviction that he had not the faculties requisite for setting it right, and would never find them in this world, among his daily experiences, the decent and decorous mantle of pride had hidden these discrepancies in the general order of things from every perception but his own. If the hale old gentleman, on whom every eye looked with respect, and who had filled his place with honour all the days of his life, had unseen companions in those walks shared visibly by his dog alone; if the handsome stately library where he sat o' nights, and read all that a country gentleman is ever expected to read, was haunted now and then by a shadowy presence, by a beckoning hand; if the gentle whisper of a voice, whose music was heard in its full melody among the angels only, came oftener and more often, as "the tender grace of a day that was dead" receded more and more into the past, and stirred the slow pulses of the old man's heart,--he was all the happier, with such solemn happiness as remembrance and anticipation can confer, and no one was the wiser. If "county society" in those parts had been brighter as a collective body, or if the individuals who composed it had had clearer notions of military life, and the obligations of a lieutenant-colonel, the long absence of Laurence Alsager from his father's house might have been made a subject of ill-natured and wondering comment; but the particular county to which Knockholt and its master belonged was rather remarkable for obtuseness, and there was a certain something about the old baronet which rendered it impossible to say unpleasant things in his presence, and difficult even to say them in his absence; and so Laurence Alsager escaped almost scot-free. Helen Manningtree felt some indignant wonder occasionally at the only son's prolonged absence from his father--indignant, be it observed, on Sir Peregrine's account, not on her own. Helen was very sensible, and as little vain as it was possible for a nice-looking and attractive girl to be, without attaining a painful height of perfection; and so she did not wonder that Laurence Alsager had not been induced by curiosity to see her--of whom Sir Peregrine had doubtless frequently spoken to him--to visit his old home. Her life had been too simple and well regulated to enable her to comprehend an estrangement between father and son arising from diversity of sentiment alone; but it had also been so devoid of strong affections, of vivid emotions, that she was not likely to regard Laurence Alsager's conduct from a particularly elevated point of view.