"How's the Lewin cäase gitting on?" someone would ask at the Cocks, and Reuben would answer: "Valiant--my näum wur sixteen times in the päaper this mornun." He almost taught himself to read by this means, for it was the first time he had ever studied a printed page, and he had soon picked up several words besides Backfield. Not that he took much interest in the case beyond Richard's--that is to say, Odiam's--share in it, but soon it became clear that Richard was leading it to marvellous developments. Lewin was a bank-manager accused of colossal frauds, and Richard amazed the country by dragging a couple of hitherto respected banking knights into the business. At one time it was thought he would get an acquittal by this, but Richard was a barrister, not a detective, and he brilliantly got his client acquitted on a point of law, which though it may have baffled a little the romantic enthusiasm of his newspaper admirers, made his name one to conjure with in legal circles, so that briefs were no longer matters of luck and prayer. His fortune was made by the Lewin case. He wrote home and told his father that he had now "arrived," and was going to marry Anne Bardon. The excitement created by his defence of Lewin was nothing to that which now raged in Rye and Peasmarsh. Reuben was besieged by the curious, who found relief for a slight alloy of envy by pointing out how unaccountable well the young man had done for himself by running away. "Reckon you dudn't think as how it 'ud turn out lik this, or you wudn't have been in such tedious heart about it." "I can't say as I'm pleased at his marrying Miss Bardon," Reuben would say. "She's ten year older than he if she's a day. 'Twas she who asked him, I reckon. He could have done better fur himself if he'd stayed at höame." § 3. Reuben had bought thirty-five more acres of Boarzell in '81, and thirty in '84. The first piece was on the Flightshot side of the Moor, by Cheat Land, the second stretched from the new ground by Totease over to Burntbarns. Now only about fifty acres, including the Fair-place and the crest, remained to be won outside the Grandturzel inclosure. Bardon publicly announced his intention never to sell the Fair-place to Backfield. Flightshot and Odiam had not been drawn together by Richard's marriage. At first Reuben had feared that the Squire might take liberties on the strength of it, and had been stiffer than ever in his unavoidable intercourse with the Manor. But Bardon had been, if anything, stiffer still. He thoroughly disapproved of Backfield as an employer of labour--some of his men were housed, with their families, in two old barns converted into cottages at the cheapest rate--and as he was too hard up to refuse to sell him Boarzell, he could express his disgust only by his attitude. Fine shades of manner were apt to be lost on Reuben, but about the refusal to sell the Fair-place there could be no mistake.