An amiable likeable man! He had gone about his parish for five and forty years, until there were only two or three in it who were older than he. Most of them now living he had christened into the Church, many he had buried, some he had married, a few he had helped, as one helps friends, not as one gives doles to the poor. He had touched the lives of all of them, and they had been satisfied with him. It was not for them to complain of the established order. These things came from above. If the Rector of Surley lived in a big house, with a thousand a year, the Squire lived in a bigger one, with ten thousand a year. The one was no more explicable than the other, and no more or less to be criticised. What might come from either to ameliorate the lot of the less fortunate would depend upon what sort of Squire or Rector there might be. Lying in his bed, as he had lain for months past, or when his strength had rallied sitting wrapped up in a big chair by the window, the old man must sometimes have occupied himself in casting up his accounts preparatory to the great Audit to which he would soon have to submit them. His life had been kindly and useful. He had never turned a deaf ear to the call of sympathy, nor shirked any of his easy duties, as easy duties are sometimes apt to be shirked when no punishment is to be expected from the shirking except from the disapproval of conscience. Probably he had given more thought to the episodes of his long life as they affected himself and his family than to the affairs of his ministry. His wife had managed him until she had died, and then his daughters had managed him. In neither case had the managing been done in such a way as to irritate, or to lessen his dignity before the world. Perhaps he had hardly known that he had been managed, for he had had his own way, and had not been aware that it was often the way into which he had been guided. If both wife and daughters had sometimes raised bristles on the backs of neighbours, it had been his part to smooth them down, and he had gained liking by the contrast between himself and them. When his wife had died he would greatly have missed her sure capable hand in the affairs of life if his daughters had not then been of an age to fill her place. He was a man to be dependent upon women, and to draw the best that was in them towards himself. The guidance exercised by women, however, seldom earns love, even when it escapes domination, and the guidance exercised by the old Rector's daughters did not always escape it, though they made his welfare the chief object in their lives. It was his son whom he loved, and thought most about, during the long hours in which he lay drifting towards the end. He had come to him late in life. He was now not yet twenty-four. If he had been only a year older the great anxiety which had shadowed the old man's last months would have been lightened.