While Sarah sat through her long torment in the kitchen, rising up at last for that great blow which at all events felled her adversary for the time being, Simon was enjoying himself airing his knowledge in the buildings, contradicting his brother on every possible occasion, and ending by feeling as if he actually owned the place. However, the reason of his visit came up at length, as it was bound to do, and his air of expert authority vanished as the position changed. One by one, as he had already done to Mr. Dent, he laid before his brother his difficulties and disappointments, much as a housewife lays out the chickens that some weasel has slain in the night. He wore the same air of disgust at such absurd accumulation of disaster, of incredulity at this overdone effort on the part of an inartistic fate. The story was not new to Will, any more than to the agent, but he listened to it patiently, nevertheless. He knew from experience that, unless you allow a man to recapitulate his woes, you cannot get him to the point from which a new effort may be made. He may seem to be following you along the fresh path which you are marking out, but in reality he will be looking back at the missed milestones of the past. And there were so many milestones in Simon’s case,--so many behind him, and so few to come. After all, it could only be a short road and a bare into which even the kindest brotherly love had power to set his feet. So for the second time that day Simon lived his long chapter of accidents over again, his voice, by turns emphatic and indignant or monotonous and resigned, falling like slanting rain over the unheeding audience of the cattle. Will, listening and nodding and revolving the question of ways and means, had yet always a slice of attention for his immediate belongings. His eye, casual yet never careless, wandered over the warm roan and brown and creamy backs between the clean stone slabs which Simon had advocated in place of the ancient wooden stalls. The herd was indoors for the winter, but had not yet lost its summer freshness, and he had sufficient cause for pride in the straight-backed, clean-horned stuff, with its obvious gentle breeding and beautiful feminine lines. That part of his mind not given to his brother was running over a string of names, seeing in every animal a host of others whose characteristics had gone to its creation, and building upon them the stuff of the generations still to come,--turning over, in fact, that store of knowledge of past history and patient prophecy for the future which gives the study of breeding at once its dignity and its fascination. At the far end of the shippon, where the calf-pens were, he could see the soft bundles of calves, with soft eyes and twitching ears, in which always the last word in the faith of the stock-breeder was being either proved or forsworn. The daylight still dropping through skylights and windows seemed to enter through frosted glass, dimmed as