Born of good farm-stock, Brack had craved for so-called higher things--he had wished to be a gentleman; and the particular brand which had formed his ideal he now quite adequately represented. But the red-hot vanity that had brought him home prancing with effect had met a rude shock. The gray, old-world atmosphere had foiled his meretricious gentility as an ancient manor-wall a flaring poster. Its mellow feudalism, its pure instinct for “the real thing,” laughed at him and cast him out. The parent-stem mocked at the prize-shoot, and, deep down in him, something, hated and unacknowledged, recognised its justice. Certain colonies, indeed, in Witham and Cunswick, drawn chiefly from other and larger towns, hailed him with enthusiasm, but in this one instance he was true to the soil and would have none of them. Yet the soil would have none of him, and gave him no fellow--neither in Bluecaster, shabby and halting, but unmistakable, nor in Lancaster, at home in each man’s understanding, and certainly none in Uncle Willie Holliday, that rugged monument of fitness of place. That which was artist in Brack, the very thing that had betrayed him, now made hell for him where he had looked for a paradise of approval. The bitterness of it obscured the real motive of his late action, turning a passionate crusade into a petty wreaking of malice, clouding even the fear that waked him, shaking, in the night. At Ladyford alone had he found balm. Michael Dockeray’s hospitality questioned the self-valuation of no guest under his roof. Francey was baffling but polite, and undoubtedly attractive, while the mistress, playing her own mother’s-game, laid no bar to his visits. He would call at Ladyford when he had finished at Ninekyrkes, and have supper with them. He lighted another cigarette, and felt vaguely comforted. Ninekyrkes seemed like a house of the dead as he came to it in the early autumn evening. Wolf and Lup were at a shorthorn sale over at Cunswick--he happened to know that--so Mrs. Whinnerah would be alone. She came to the door when she saw the car, and received his self-introduction hospitably if without enthusiasm. She led the way into the unloved parlour, and Brack, breathing horsehair and mustiness, was inwardly flattered until assailed by a childish memory of the old Lord Bluecaster at Pippin, smoking on the settle with his feet on the hob. The old lord had d----d the parlour, and refused to bear company with the Family Bible. Brack had an uncomfortable feeling that the still woman opposite would have thought more of him if he had preferred the kitchen.