“By George! yes. I know the old beggar—a regular Silas; lives in a house smothered up in trees on the third hill beyond Rilchester—a regular hermitage, like a house out of a novel. You can’t see it for trees till you get well inside the gate. I attended there on one solitary occasion. It was the servant. Res natura. I only got paid after a lawyer’s letter. Never been there since.” Gabriel appeared interested despite his affectation. He had turned the doctor into good grazing land, and anecdotes bristled. Dr. Marjoy had not lived fifteen years with his wife without assimilating some of her linguistical propensities. “I remember talking with Clissold, of the bank,” he said, “and he told me that old Gildersedge’s figures totted up phenomenally. He’s worth two Scrooges. And, by Jeremy! he has a daughter; I was forgetting that daughter.” Gabriel tilted his chair and surveyed the clouds. “A pretty beauty, I suppose,” he said, with cynical facility. Dr. Marjoy, on the contrary, leaned forward and appeared curiously in earnest. “I call it a damned sin,” he observed, oblivious for the moment of his surroundings. Gabriel stared. “I remember that girl well. She is a splendid creature, and I wondered how such an old slut had been able to create such an anomaly. Poor little beggar, she had the airs of a convent child and a queen rolled into one. And to think of that young thing being penned up with a money-crusted sot and a beast of a servant!” Gabriel’s chair tilted forward abruptly. He sat rigid and nearly bit through his cigar. “This sounds Russian.” “It’s the truth.” “Poor little woman! I suppose she’s only a child. Her surroundings must mar her in the making.” The doctor cogitated. “I don’t know about that,” he said; “women are queer creatures. Rear one in a regular moral hothouse, and she’ll turn out a scarlet devil. Bring up another in a dirty back garden, and she’ll grow up a regular snow-white seraph. I only saw that girl once, but I’ll swear there’s real grit in her.” “God grant it!” And from that moment the two men seemed to become strangely solemn. Gabriel left Saltire that afternoon in the Gabingly carriage. He was to stay the night at the castle and to attend a flower-show next day under the auspices of the Gussets. It had already been mooted by the two parents that Gabriel should stand for the constituency at the next election. Old Sir Hercules Dimsdale was a decadent politician and none too eager to continue in the ruck of publicity. The Gusset influence was powerful, and John Strong ambitious. He was too old, he declared, to contest the seat himself; his pride should be perfected in his son.