To Jim, as to the others, Byron was merely an angry, disappointed man. "The shoe’s on the other foot," he cried, his spirits rising, the ready but provocative smile on his lips. "Come to that, ’tis for you to go, not me." Byron swept out an annihilating arm. This gadfly, he would brush him off, silence him. "Cuss yer, get out of me sight." But Jim, wheeling lightly, appealed to the executors. "I’ve a right to be ’ere?" To Byron’s confused surprise, Tom nodded briefly and Constantine, with a grunt of assent, admitted the claim. "What right ’av yer got then?" He realized that Jim must be settled with, before they could get back to the matter in hand—the farming of Wastralls. Byron still nursed a flicker of hope that he might be left as manager or bailiff, that this fate which was hovering would not be allowed to swoop. Before Jim’s light tongue could reel off the ready answer, Constantine interposed. "Let Gray speak," said he, probing among the shadows for his niece. "’Tis ’er land." "Iss, come now, Gray," said her father encouragingly. "’Tis for you to say." Never had Gray disputed her father’s seldom-imposed will and now, though so reluctant that it seemed to her, her feet were leaden, she came to the table. Her heart was beating fast. The publicity, even this modified publicity of the family, was, to one of her retiring nature, very unwelcome; nevertheless she carried herself with a modest dignity. She had even a little air of confidence, as if in her bosom was a store of courage on which she could draw at will; and this confidence in one so timid, so unassuming, appeared as a grace. That day as, with colour in her cheeks and a steady light in her midnight eyes, Gray faced her redoubtable relative, she was at her finest and most desirable. "Uncle Leadville," she began simply and the man shrank with a gesture of repudiation from the wounding title; but all her life he had been ’Uncle’ to her and he would be so to the end. "Uncle Leadville, I’m sorry if what Aunt S’bina done is against your wish, but the land was hers and she could do what she liked with it. You know it has always belonged to her family and been worked, in the way that we are used to down here. I’m very sorry to go against you in anything but—" she paused and her serious steady gaze shifted from the dark face, watching her as a condemned man watches the sinking sun the night before he is shot, to Jim’s blithe countenance; and, as it shifted, her eyes softened, filling with an expression no one in the room, not even Byron himself, could mistake, "but I think it’s only right my husband should work the farm for me." "My husband," Gray had said and when her voice ceased the words were still echoing through the room. They had fallen on Byron’s ears, on his passionate craving heart as fall words of doom against which there is no appeal.