“I’d always thought the Lugg might be a menace to the top marsh. The neck of the bay is so narrow--it used to look to me as if the Lugg was choking it. And, like Brack, I’ve seen storms--one does see things knocking about as I do,” he added half-apologetically, the idle, rich traveller to the home-keeping worker. “And the reclaimed land always made me creep a bit. It looked so--well--_snatched!_ I’ve a fear of the sea, although I’ve been out on it so much in all sorts of cockle-shells. It always has something in hand. You may trick it, but it generally gets its own back in the end. And though I know all the marsh has been fought out of it, yard by yard, it seemed to me to have a queer kind of grudge about the land behind the Lugg. I’d have been glad to see it go, and that’s the truth! But then--your father had built it, and I’d been brought up on the things your father did. They used to call him the Big Man of the North. _He_ said the Lugg would stand, and it did, long after he wasn’t there to see that it was doing as it was told. Then _you_ came--as good a man as your father--_yes!_--and said the same thing, and I kept quiet. All the marsh knew my opinion wasn’t worth the flick of a whip against yours. If I’d touched the bank, they’d have taken it that I meant to slight you, and I would have cut off my head rather than do that. See?” He smote the table suddenly with his clenched fist. “God! What a liar and a coward I am! That’s all lies--you know it, don’t you, Lancaster?--no--not lies, perhaps, but side-issues. The truth is, I was afraid, as I’ve always been afraid when it came to a big shove. I shirked having to speak out, having to decide, so I put it on to you. I knew _you_ wouldn’t be afraid, that you would take the straight path as you saw it. I knew you’d shoulder things for me, as you’d always done. You must have despised me often; and yet I don’t think that, somehow. But I’d despise myself more than I do if I didn’t feel that they’ve given me overweight to carry--the powers up above that fix our place for us down below. I wasn’t meant to handle men. It isn’t my job. I shouldn’t have been slung up like St. Simon what’s-his-name on his pillar. I was cut out a quiet, retiring, harmless individual with a taste for sailing and rather a good eye at tennis, and I’m expected to be a symbol, a father-confessor, general caretaker, referee and prop of the State! I haven’t been any of all that except in spurts. You’ve had to be it for me; but in the end it all comes back to me. It’s slated down to my account. The responsibility’s mine. It isn’t that I don’t love the place and the people, and the feel of it all belonging to me, but those of us who stop to think what it means are paying for it all the time, even chuckle-headed idiots like myself. Do they never realise--these men who are always going for the landlords--that power and place have to be paid for, and in bitter coin? It all looks so easy from the outside;