The inquest, the long, dreary spell of wild weather, intensifying the merciless handling of the marsh--the dismal rent-audit, the interminable hours of calculating and planning, of patient hearing of complaint, of ordering and overseeing repairs--all these were behind him now. The new tenant was settled at Ninekyrkes, and the Dockerays had taken both him and his to their robbed hearts. For Francey was in Canada with Lup, and though the old folk were for ever planning a future that held Rowly with a wife at Ladyford, and Lup back at the twin-farm--Dockera’s and Whinnerahs as of yore--they knew well enough that for the wanderers there could be no place ever again on the Northern marsh. Slowly the wreck of things was pulled back into symmetry and order--houses carpeted and papered, Dutch barns rebuilt, fences set up again, the mutilated roads laid and rolled. The Let, too, had had all its yawning mouths filled and strengthened, and the dykes and cuts were deepened and increased. So the patched marsh grew trim again, and by the time the haycutter sang on the hill, the land below had gathered itself out of the horrors of destruction into a growing likeness of its old beauty. Only the Lugg and the Pride were left untouched, derelicts at the will of wind and tide. The story had roused a storm of interest throughout the country, coming as it did at a slack time for news, and carrying with it the precious breath of long romance. Lanty refused all dealings with reporters and kept his eyes from the papers, yet knew well enough that both his father’s career and his own, their private life, and probably his personal future, were all common property in a highly decorated fashion. Into a seething world of clashing interests and warring classes the tale of the Northern property, where the flower of ancestry still sprang purely as well from yeoman and peasant stock as from patrician, where law was less than loyalty, long service a matter of course, friendship and understanding things born of inbred knowledge--dropped like a mediæval, blazoned shield into the arena of modern warfare. Men picked it up wonderingly, fitting it clumsily to an unaccustomed arm, only to discard it with a laugh. “No agreements? _That’s_ a lie, anyhow! You’ve got to have everything down in writing, nowadays, or else it’s just simply putting your neck in a halter. Landlord’s personal charm--tenants’ appreciation--sounds like the days of Magna Charta, doesn’t it?--tenure by knight service, socage, villeinage, and all the rest of it! I must say these journalists know how to pile on the colour. Amity between agent and farmers--well, I just _don’t_ think! Why, it’s an understood thing that they’re always at each other’s throats! Scion of Hugh Lupus of the Conquest gives his life for an old trust--feudalism dug up by the spadeful, and plastered on with a trowel! _Lies!_”