swinging into Elmdale. A gallant figure at the reins seemed somehow familiar. Therefore, instead of describing the kind of bath he wished Tom Bland to bring from an ironmonger's, he said sharply to the postman:

"Who is that in the dog-cart?"

"Young Mr. Walker, o' Nuttonby, sir," was the answer.

James Walker! The man whom Marguérite Ogilvey said she hated, and such a phrase on a girl's lips with reference to a man like Walker almost invariably means that she has been pestered by his attentions. The Grange was nearly a mile distant, and Walker was now dashing through the village street.

"Damn!" said Armathwaite, making off at top speed.

Miggles gazed after him.

"Rum houses draws rum coves," he said, trudging away on his daily round. "Not that he's the first who's damned young Jimmy Walker, not by a jolly long way!"

Evidently, an Aristotelian postman.

CHAPTER VI

THE STORM BREAKS

Armathwaite's face, as he strode through Elmdale, was hardly that of a man who had found there the quiet and solitude he had stipulated for when in treaty with Walker & Son. Its stern and harassed aspect was seen and commented on by a score of people. Though most of the inhabitants were busy in the fields, there were watchers in plenty peering from each farm and cottage. Already the village held in common the scanty stock of information possessed by the Jacksons concerning the Grange's new tenant, because mother and daughter were far too shrewd to provoke discussion by withholding the facts stated by the house agent. They knew that every urchin who could toddle had peeped through gate and hedges that morning; they were more alive than Armathwaite himself to the risk Miss Meg ran of being seen if she went outside the house, front or back, for ten seconds. The best way to disarm gossip was to answer as best they might the four questions put by every inquirer: Who is he? Where does he come from? Is he married? How long will he stop?

Singularly enough, in a land of variable weather, Elmdale at this time was bathed in brilliant sunshine from morn till eve. The ripening crops, the green uplands, the moor, with its 

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