Of course the one thing I had to avoid was any show of sympathy; she would have resented bitterly such an impertinence. If I knew her at all--and I had been an interested observer of her growth from childhood to woman’s estate--the sympathy of the county, unheard but infallibly divined, was a sore aggravation of her fate. As I read extracts from the documents and explained their effect, freeing them from technicalities, as Sir Thomas had thoughtfully charged me, my impassivity equalled hers. I might have been telling her the price of bloaters at Great Yarmouth that morning, and she considering the purchase of half-a-dozen. In fact, we overdid it between us; we were both grotesquely uninterested in the documents; our artificial calm made a poor contrast to the primitive and disguise-scorning exultation of the pair who had gone riding over the turf in the sunshine. I could not help it; I had to take my cue from her. My old father had loved her; perhaps he would have patted her hand, perhaps he would even have kissed her cheek: what would have happened to her composure then? On the other hand, he would have been much more on Sir Thomas’s side than I was. He used often to quote to me a saying of his uncle’s, the venerable founder of the fine business we enjoyed: “Every other generation, the heir ought to lay an egg and then die.” The long minority which he contemplated as resulting from a family bereavement _prima facie_ so sad would reëstablish the family finances. The Chinese and Japanese, I am told, worship their ancestors. English landed gentry worship their descendants, and of this cult the family lawyer is high priest. My father would have patted Beatrice Gladwin’s cheek, but he would not have invoked a curse on Sir Thomas, as I was doing behind my indifferent face and with the silent end of my drily droning tongue. I was very glad when we got to the end of the documents. She gave me a nod and a smile, saying, “I quite understand,” then rose and went to the window. I began to tie my papers up in their tapes. The drafts were to go back to be engrossed. She stood looking out on the park. The absurd impulse to say that I was very sorry, but that I really couldn’t help it, assailed me again. I resisted, and tied the tapes in particularly neat bows, admiring the while her straight, slim, flat-shouldered figure. She looked remarkably efficient; I found myself regretting that she was not to have the management of the estate. Was that in her mind, too, as she surveyed it from the window? I do not know, but I do know that the next moment she asked me if Spencer Fullard were ill; she had not seen him about lately. I said that he was, I believed, in robust health, but had been up in town on business. (He had gone to raise a loan, if that’s material.) The subject then dropped. I did not, at the time, see any reason why it had cropped up at all at that particular and somewhat uncomfortable moment. What had put Spencer Fullard into her head?