devised and carried out unsparing retrenchments; thriftless tenants, after warning, were got rid of, and energetic men introduced in their places; a better style of farming was suggested, and all who adopted it were helped by their landlord. The estate improved so greatly and so rapidly that vacant farms were largely competed for, and rents were rising, when suddenly Mark Challoner withdrew himself from the life into which he had plunged with such eagerness, and in which he had succeeded so well, and became a confirmed recluse, a querulous, moody, silent man, loving solitude, hating companionship, shutting out from him all human interest. A sudden change this, and one which did not happen without exciting remarks from all the little world round Rowley Court, both high and low. The Walbrooks and their set (for during the few later years there had been frequent irruptions of the plutocracy into the old county families, and the Walbrooks were now the shining centre of a circle of people with almost as much money and as little breeding as themselves)--the Walbrooks and their set shook their heads and shrugged their shoulders, and secretly rejoiced that the old man from whom they never received anything but the sternest courtesy, and who so pertinaciously repelled all attempts at familiar intercourse from them, had at last come upon the evil days in store for him, and would no longer twit them by his aristocratic presence and frigid behaviour. The more humble classes--the old tenantry, who had been rejoicing at the better turn which things on the estate had undoubtedly taken, and who were looking forward to a long career of good management under the reign of Mark Challoner and his sons--were wofully disappointed at the change, and expressed their disappointment loudly amongst themselves, while taking due care that it should never reach the master's ear. No one, however, either among the neighbours or the dependents, seemed to notice that the change in Mark Challoner's life--that his fading from the hearty English squire into the premature old man, that his abnegating the exercise of his tastes and pleasures, and giving up everything in which he had hitherto felt the keenest interest--was contemporaneous with the departure of his younger son, Geoffrey, from the paternal roof. In that act there was nothing to create surprise: it had always been known that Master Geoffrey's talents were destined to find exercise in the great arena of London, and now that he was eighteen years of age, it was natural that he should wish to bring those talents into play; and though nothing had been said in or out of the house about his going, until one morning when he told the coachman to bring round the dogcart and to come with him to the station, there was no expression, of surprise on the part of any of the household--beings to whom the expression of anything they might feel was of the rarest occurrence. The old butler, indeed, a relic of the