"To the devil with your ghost! You're drunk!" shouted the old parson, and lifted his hand. The boy cowered, stumbled and fell on the threshold. He was indeed too late. That was what happened at Waynflete Hall, in October, 1785. PART ONE, CHAPTER ONE. THE FAMILY. The splendid sunset of a late August day in the year 1885 was staining the smoky atmosphere which enveloped the manufacturing district of Ingleby with rich and subtle tints. Margaret Waynflete sat at an upstairs window of a large square stone house, looking across a garden, filled with brilliant flowers and smoke-dulled shrubs, over lovely undulations of wood and field, and unlovely forms of mill and chimney half veiled in tawny, luminous mist, Beyond, hill behind hill, and moor above moor, in endless succession, were lost in grey-gold smoke and fog. She was an old woman, with a line strong face of marked outline, and a tall, strong frame, dressed handsomely in sober and dignified garments suitable to her years and position. Her face was wrinkled and weather-beaten, with the look that comes of facing hard weather through a long life; but it told of perfect health, of unimpaired strength of mind and body. Nevertheless Margaret Waynflete was engaged in the religious duty of "considering her latter end." So probably she would have expressed herself, for she was a person who always endeavoured to fulfil any duty that she recognised, and such consideration was becoming to a woman of seventy-six. But what she was really considering was her former life, and that, not so much with a view to repenting her sins, or regretting her shortcomings--though if she had such she was truly desirous of repenting and regretting them--as of shaping the future in such a way that her past work should not be undone by those who would come after her. She had had a life work. She had attempted something and had done it. She had lifted her good old name out of the dust, and had restored her fallen family to its natural station. And she was intensely proud both of her family name, of her own success, and of the means by which the success had been obtained. When she thought of the day when she should be laid in the old churchyard at Waynflete, she desired as much that the business, to which the restored fortunes of the family were owing, should be honourably and skilfully managed, as that the family name should be borne with grace and dignity. "We owe the old place to the business," she said once to her two great-nephews; "and it's a poor thing to forget the bridge that carries you over."