of a botanist, and a bit of a geologist: what with one thing and another his time went pleasantly—and uneventfully. In outward appearance, Mr. Fransemmery was a cheerful little person. Somewhat under medium height, he was inclined to portliness; like many little men, he carried himself very erect, and was proud of the fact that he was as straight of back and square of shoulder at fifty as he had been at twenty-five. His clean-shaven face was round and rosy; his eyes were bright behind his big gold-mounted spectacles; he had beautiful teeth and plentiful light-brown hair; scrupulous to a fault about his personal appearance, he always looked, said the village folk, as if he had just come out of a band-box, by which they meant that he was perfectly groomed. There was, indeed, an air of perpetual youth and freshness about Mr. Fransemmery: each spring seemed to find him younger than the last. People chaffed him about his juvenility; if he ever troubled himself to explain it, he did so by solemnly repeating the old saying—“Early to bed and early to rise makes a man healthy, wealthy, and wise.” Mr. Fransemmery, since his arrival at The Warren, and his beginning of a truly rural existence, had always gone to bed at half-past nine o’clock and risen with the lark. He was up with the lark on this particular morning; was rising, as a matter of fact, at the very moment wherein, half a mile away at Markenmore Court, Harry Markenmore was quietly telling his sister Valencia that their father had died in his sleep. Mr. Fransemmery, of course, knew nothing of that; his thoughts were not of death but of life. He, too, drew his blinds and saw the red dawn, and heard the thrushes and blackbirds in the neighbouring plantations; he smelled the scent of the spring-tide, and longed to be out of doors. It was his custom to go for a long walk every morning before his nine-o’clock breakfast; he was going to keep to it this morning. But first there were things to be done. His servants were never up before six: Mr. Fransemmery did things for himself. He was a great man for labour-saving devices; in his house at any hour of the day or night, hot water was ready in any sleeping chamber. Accordingly Mr. Fransemmery could get his bath and his shaving water by merely twisting a tap; he had a patent stove, too, in his own bedroom whereon he would make tea or coffee in a few minutes. So now, long before his housekeeper, his parlourmaid, and his housemaid had opened their eyes, he was bathing, shaving, dressing, and in due time sipping his fragrant Mocha and nibbling digestive biscuits. At precisely six o’clock, clad in a smart suit of grey tweed, and shod in stout shooting boots, strong enough to meet the searching morning dews, he went downstairs, picked up an ashplant stick in his hall, and putting a rakish-looking cap on his head, set out across the high lands across The Warren.