Sixty years before Margaret Waynflete had been a fine, strong girl, intensely conscious of her good blood, though her father was but a working farmer, and she herself had had a humble education, and spoke with the strongest accent of her native county. The family had fallen so completely that every one but Margaret had forgotten the fact, and it hardly appeared extraordinary, though it might be sad, when her father's death left her with the choice of going to service or of working in the mills with her little brother. Margaret put her shawl over her head and went to her work every day; a fair, rosy girl with abundant flaxen hair, and large, finely cut features. Her beauty attracted the attention of the mill-owner, Thomas Palmer, a man no longer young, of humbler origin, and not much better education than her own, but of rapidly increasing wealth. He courted Margaret honourably, and she married him on condition that he would send her little brother Godfrey to school. Years passed, of rising fortune which no children came to inherit. Thomas Palmer's relations were all well established in businesses of their own, and when he died he left everything he possessed to his wife, and Godfrey Waynflete was her natural heir. Already, a little bit of the old Waynflete property, which lay in a moorland valley twenty miles away from Ingleby, had been bought by the wealthy mill-owner, and as time went on, Margaret, in whose hands the mills prospered, recovered it all, and when the house itself came into her possession she took her own name again. Her brother had married well; but he died young, leaving a son who bore the other family name of Guy. He should be the future Waynflete of Waynflete; but again disappointment came, for Guy was killed by an accident three years after his marriage. His young wife died in giving birth to a second son, and the old great-aunt was left with two babies, Guy and Godfrey, on whom to fix her long-deferred hopes. Sixteen years had passed since that day, during which the business had been the duty, and the family name the romance of her life. She loved both now, as people do love the objects of a life's devotion, with an imperious demand that those who came after her should love them also; and now, as she sat in her armchair, and thought of her age, and of preparing for death, she was really thinking about the two young lads, whose future fate lay in her power. The eldest ought to have Waynflete; but it did not suit with her ideas to make him the squire and his brother the mill-owner, as might have seemed natural. The money that had been made in Ingleby Mills ought not to be diverted from their interests for the support of the Squire of Waynflete. He must be a partner in the business, even if the chief management of it fell to his brother. And the Squire of Waynflete ought to be the eldest son.