Allan noted the cottages which bore the Wornock "W" above the date of the building--he noted them, but lost count of their number--keepers' lodges in the woodland which skirted the park--gardeners' or dairy-men's cottages at every park gate; farmhouse and bailiff's house; cottages for coachmen and helpers. At every available angle where gable, roof, and quaint old chimney-stack could make a picturesque feature in the landscape, a cottage had been placed, and the number of these ideal dwellings suggested territorial importance in a manner more obvious than any effect made by the mere extent of acreage, a thing that is talked about but not seen. Discombe Chase, the Discombe lodges, and the village and school-houses of Discombe were obvious facts which impressed the stranger. That sweetly pensive face of Mrs. Wornock's had slain the viper envy in Allan's breast. When first he rode through those woods and over those undulating pastures and by those gables embowered in roses and wisteria, or starred with the pale blue clematis, he had felt a certain sour discontent with his own good fortune, about which people, from his mother down to the acquaintance of yesterday, prattled and prosed so officiously. He was sick of hearing himself called a lucky fellow. Luck, forsooth! what was his luck compared with Geoffrey Wornock's? That a bachelor uncle of his, having scraped together a modest little fortune, and not being able to carry it with him to the nether-world, should have passed it on to him, Allan, was not such a strange event as to warrant the running commentary of congratulation that had assailed his ear ever since he came to Matcham. No one congratulated Geoffrey Wornock. Nobody talked of _his_ good luck. He had been born in the purple, and people spoke of him as of one having a divine right to the best things that this earth can give--to a Carolian mansion, and chase and park, and wide-spreading farms. There seemed to Allan Carew's self-consciousness an implied disparagement of himself in the tone which Matcham people took about Geoffrey Wornock. They in a manner congratulated him on his likeness to the Lord of Discombe Manor, and insinuated that he ought to be proud of himself because of this resemblance to the local magnate. To-day, however, Allan forgot all those infinitesimal vexations which in the beginning of his residence at Matcham had made the name of Wornock odious to him. His thoughts were full of that pale sad face, the wasted cheeks, the heavy eyelids, the somewhat sickly transparency of complexion, the large violet eyes, which lit up the whole face as with a light that is not of this world. It was the most spiritual countenance he had ever seen--the first face which had ever suggested to him the epithet ethereal.