His son--his only child--sat between the other two men, with his back to the fireplace. He had the mountain colouring, for all that he had been bred on a marsh-farm--the dark hair, and the gray eyes that have the blue of mountain-mist across them, the dale length and breadth, too, and the long, easy, almost lurching swing in his walk. And he had the slow, soft, deep, dale voice, and its gentle, distant dignity of manner. He sat, for the most part, looking at the table, while his father laid his case before the agent. It was a case that put himself hopelessly in the wrong, but he kept his mouth shut, and stayed undefended. He had learned to keep his mouth shut. Argument with Wolf generally led to something perilously near unharnessed battle. He was over thirty, now, and during all the years he had worked for his father he had never had a penny’s wage. He had been kept and clothed, like a child, had tips for treats doled him like a child, and like a child been ruled in all his ways. He did not resent it; there was no question of injustice, since it was the custom in his class, and only slowly was it drawing towards change. But it kept a man his father’s property in a way curiously patriarchal and out of date to an outsider, making paternal authority a mighty weapon, and filial independence a strange, iconoclastic crime. “Yon’s the way of it, sir!” old Whinnerah finished, leaning back in his chair, and spreading the long fingers of his knotted hand along the table, opening and shutting them slowly, as if they levered the operation of his mind. “I’m done, and the farm must go; and if the lad won’t take it on, as he says he won’t, why, then, there’s nowt for it but I must go an’ all!” He looked down at his hand as he spoke, and clenched it, for it was trembling. The other men looked at it, too, Lancaster with regretful eyes; but the younger glanced away sharply, and set the line of his mouth a trifle closer. “It’s bad hearing!” the agent said at last, seeing that the son did not mean to speak. “You’ve been at Ninekyrkes so long, you Whinnerahs. Naturally we like to keep the farms in the family, if it’s a family worth having. We’d be more than sorry to part with you--you don’t need telling that. Can’t you see your way to stopping on a bit longer yourself?” The old man raised himself painfully to his feet, looking indeed like a grim old wolf, with the last yard of pace run out of him, and the last ounce of fight gone from him. His name he owed to a family tradition tracing a connection with Hugh Lupus of the Conquest, through his sister Lucia. Wolf’s son had the name in its Latin dignity, long since distorted to everyday use.