This was not skilful enough. "Cause of complaint!" echoed the Squire irritably. "Am I accustomed to complain about anything without good reason? You talk as if I am the last man in the world to have the right to expect my wishes to be consulted. Every one knows that I gave way to Walter against my better judgment. I allowed him to take up this doctoring because he had set his mind on it, and I have never said a word against it since. And how now does he reward me when he has got to the point at which he might begin to do himself and his family some credit? Coolly writes to me for money--_to me_--_for money_--to enable him to buy a practice at Melbury Park, if you please. Melbury _Park_! Pah!!" The Squire pushed his half-emptied plate away from him in uncontrollable disgust. He was really too upset to eat his breakfast. The utterance of the two words which summed up Walter's blind, infatuated stampede from respectability brought back all the poignant feelings with which he had first read his letter. For the moment he was quite beside himself with anger and disgust, and unless relief had been brought to him he would have left his breakfast unfinished and stalked out of the room. Nancy brought the relief with the artless question, "Where is Melbury Park, father?" "Hold your tongue," said the Squire promptly, and then drew a lurid picture of a place delivered over entirely to the hovels of nameless people of the lower middle classes, and worse, a place in which you would be as effectually cut off from your fellows as if you went to live in Kamschatka. Indeed, you would not be so cut off if you went to Kamschatka, for you might be acknowledged to be living there, but to have it said that you lived at Melbury Park would _stamp_ you. It would be as easy to say you were living in Halloway Goal. It was a place they stopped you at when you came into London on the North Central Railway, to take your tickets. The Squire mentioned this as if a place where they took your tickets was of necessity a dreadful kind of a place. "Little have I ever thought," he said, "when I have been pulled up there, and looked at those streets and streets of mean little houses, that a son of mine would one day want to go and _live_ there. 'Pon my word, I think Walter's brain must be giving way." It was Cicely who asked why Walter wanted to live at Melbury Park, and what Muriel said about it.