Cheriton Chase was exercising its wonted influence upon him. He loved the place with that deep love which is often felt by the hereditary owner, the man born on the soil, but perhaps still oftener, and to a greater degree by him who has conquered and won the land by his own hard labour of head or hand, by that despicable personage, the self-made man. In all his wanderings—those luxurious reposeful journeyings of the man who has conquered fortune—James Dalbrook’s heart yearned towards these ancient avenues and yonder grey walls. House and domain had all the charm of antiquity, and yet they were in a measure his own creation. Everywhere had his hand improved and beautified; and he might say with Augustus that where he found brick he would leave marble. The dense green walls—those open-air courts and quadrangles—those obelisks of cypress and juniper had been there in the dominion of the Strangways, with here and there a mouldering stone Syrinx or a moss-grown Pan; but it was he who brought choicest marbles from Rome and Florence to adorn that stately pleasaunce; it was he who erected yonder fountain, whose waters made a monotonous music by day and night. The marble balustrades, the mosaic floors, the artistic enrichment of terrace and mansion had been his work. If the farms were perfect it was he who had made them so. If his tenants were contented it was because he had shown himself a model landlord—considerate and liberal, but severely exacting, satisfied with nothing less than perfection. Having thus in a manner created his estate James Dalbrook loved it, as a proud, self-contained man is apt to love the work of his own hands, and now in this quiet Sunday afternoon the very atmosphere of the place soothed him, as if by a spell. A kind of sensuous contentment stole into his heart, with temporary forgetfulness of his daughter’s ruined life. But this did not last long. As he drew near the drive by which strangers were allowed to cross the park by immemorial right, he remembered that he had questioned one of the lodge-keepers, but not the other. He struck across an open glade where only old hawthorn trees cast their rugged shadows on the close-cropped turf, and made for the gate opening into the lane. Mrs. Porter’s cottage had its usual aspect, a cottage such as any gentleman or lady of refined taste might have been pleased to inhabit, quaint, mediæval, with heavy timbers across rough cast walls, deep-set casements, picturesque dormers, and thatched roof, with gable ends which were a source of rapture to every artist who visited Cheriton—a cottage embowered in loveliest creeping plants, odorous of jasmine and woodbine, and set in a garden where the standard roses and carnations were rumoured to excel those in her ladyship’s own particular flower-garden. Well might a lady who had known better days rejoice in such a haven; more especially when those better days appeared to have raised her no higher than the status of a merchant-captain’s wife.