Yes, he answered, that was pretty well what it all came to. Would to God it did not!--always and only Colonel Jack at Hover in these days. And my lord lay a-dying, so they said, at Bath; and my young lord gave no sign. And her ladyship flitted in, like some great bright-painted butterfly, for a day and a night. Looked round the stables and gardens with a laugh, hanging on the Colonel’s arm, and flitted off again, as gay as you please, to London or Bath, or Old Nick knew where; while Colonel Jack, with a face like thunder and a temper like tinder, cursed the very guts out of anyone unlucky enough to cross his path for full twenty-four hours afterwards. Colonel Esdaile was a changed man, as I gathered; his swaggering manner and jovial good-humour a thing of the past, save at rare intervals or when her ladyship happened to be about. All of which was bad hearing. The more so as, without going all lengths with Braithwaite in his condemnation of our hereditary nobility, I believed then--and believe firmly still--that if a great nobleman, or great landowner, is to justify his position--aye, and his very existence--he must live on his estate, keep in close touch with, and hold himself directly responsible for the welfare of, all ranks of its population--labourers, artisans, rent-payers great and small, alike. The middle-man, however just or able an administrator, introduces, and must always introduce, a cold-blooded, mechanical relation as between landlord and tenant, employer and employed. And, now listening to Warcop’s lament, I trembled lest the curse of absenteeism--which during recent years has worked such havoc of class hatred and disaffection in Ireland--should set its evil mark upon this English country-side. In this connection it was inevitable that memories of my former dreams and ambitions for Hover should come back to me with a bitter sense of failure and of regret. Dreams and ambitions of so educating and training my dear pupil as to make him an ideal landowner, an ideal nobleman, to whom no corner of his vast possessions, the lives lived and work done there, would be a matter of indifference; but who would accept and obey the divinely ordained law of rulership and ownership which reminds us every privilege carries with it a corresponding obligation, and that the highest duty of him who governs is to serve.