This evening he sat very still beside the dead. Only once he drew down the sheet from his father's face and gazed at the calm features, already wearing that strange sculpt look which is the gift of death. The peaceful lips, the folded hands, seemed part of an embracing restfulness. Reuben's heart warmed with a love in which was little grief. He thought of his father's life--calm, kindly, comfortable, ambitionless. He had been happy; having wanted little he had attained it and had died enjoying it. Reuben recalled the last five years--they had been fat years. One by one small comforts, small luxuries, had been added to the house, as the farm throve modestly, fulfilling itself within the narrow boundaries its master had appointed. And all the time that mocking furious crest of Boarzell had broken the sky in the south--telling of beauty unseized, might unconquered, pride untamed. So now was it strange that clashing with his sorrow, and his regretful love for one who, if he had never truly loved him, had always treated him with generosity and kindness, there should be a soaring sense of freedom and relief?--a consciousness of standing on the edge of a boundless plain after years of confinement within walls? For Reuben was master now. Odiam was his--and the future of Odiam. He could follow his own will, he could take up that challenge which Boarzell Moor had flung him five years ago, when he fought and was flogged because he loved the red gaping clay between the gorse-stumps. His plans of conquest were more definite now. He had been forming them for five years, and he could not deny that during his father's illness he had shaped them with a certain finality. The road was clear before him, and to a slight extent fate had been propitious, keeping open a way which might well have been blocked before he began to tread it. Reuben had never been able to settle what he should do if the Squire's first project were fulfilled and the Moor sold in building plots. House property entered with difficulty into his imagination, and he coveted only Boarzell virgin of tool and brick. Luckily for him, Bardon's scheme had completely failed. The position of the common was bad for houses, windy and exposed in days when the deepest hollows were the most eligible building sites; the neighbourhood was both unfashionable and unfruitful, therefore not likely to attract either people of means or people without them. Also there were grave difficulties about a water supply. So Boarzell remained desolate, except for the yearly jostle of the Fair, and rumour said that Bardon would be only too glad to sell it or any piece of it to whoever would buy.