The room in which he sat was a fine one, with long windows opening on to a wide terrace with heavy stone balustrades, over and through which masses of roses climbed in graceful luxuriance of spray and bloom. Beyond lay yet another terrace, wider and larger than the first, with beds gay with many-coloured flowers, set in the greenest of velvet turf. A belt of trees bounded the further side of the lower platform, their topmost branches were bent sideways and shorn by the prevailing winds, while in the distance stretched the straight blue line of the North Sea, now rippling and sparkling in the morning sunshine. Mr. Field finished his egg and leant back pompously in his carved oak chair. He was a strongly built man, of medium height and with a tendency to stoutness, which did not improve his already clumsy figure. His neck was short and thick, and more than one layer of what is popularly known as a double chin lurked beneath his square and heavy jaws. Small eyes of a pale tawny brown looked out from under scarcely defined eyebrows, which twitched and frowned nervously, betokening a restless and uneasy mind. A scrubby moustache only slightly hid the thin compressed lips, at the corners of which ran deeply graven lines, as if they sought by their almost cruel hardness to counteract the weakness of the brow. It was a selfish and secretive face, and just at present it was a very self-satisfied one as it turned towards the fair scene beyond the casement. "Julius," he said, turning to the other occupant of the room, "it’s not every lad of your age who starts in life with such prospects. A house like Farncourt and enough dollars to buy up all the landowners round about! My sakes--not many boys in England can boast of that, I can tell you! Don’t you forget it, Julius; and don’t let others forget it either." "I think Farncourt is a horrid old hole, father, and what use is it saying you can buy up all the landowners when you can’t get the only bit of ground you really want, however much you try, even though it only belongs to a poor fisherman like Timothy Green?" The speaker was a small boy of about ten years of age. He might have been a good-looking child if it had not been for the discontented expression upon his face, and the ill-tempered mouth and chin. From his speech, if you did not look at him, he might have been double his age. Thomas Field’s countenance darkened as he directed his gaze beyond the terrace boundary, where, in a gap between the trees, a whitewashed cottage could be seen, standing out plainly against the background of sea. As a red rag to a bull, so was this unpretentious building to the owner of Farncourt.