Things were not going on any better at Hamley Hall. Nothing had occurred to change the state of dissatisfied feeling into which the squire¹ and his eldest² son had respectively fallen; and the long continuance merely of dissatisfaction is sure of itself to deepen the feeling. Roger did all in his power to bring the father and son together; but sometimes wondered if it would not have been better to leave them alone; for they were falling into the habit of respectively making him their confidant, and so defining emotions and opinions which would have had less distinctness if they had been unexpressed. There was little enough relief in the daily life at the Hall to help them all to shake off the gloom; and it even told on the health of both the squire and Osborne. The squire became thinner, his skin as well as his clothes began to hang loose about him, and the freshness of his colour turned to red streaks⁴, till his cheeks looked like Eardiston pippins, instead of resembling ‘a Katherine pear on the side that’s next the sun.’ Roger thought that his father sate⁵ indoors and smoked in his study more than was good for him, but it had become difficult to get him far afield; he was too much afraid of coming across some sign of the discontinued drainage works, or being irritated afresh by the sight of his depreciated⁶ timber. Osborne was wrapt up in the idea of arranging his poems for the press, and so working out his wish for independence. What with daily writing to his wife — taking his letters himself to a distant post-office, and receiving hers there — touching⁷ up his sonnets⁸, &c., with fastidious care; and occasionally giving himself the pleasure of a visit to the Gibsons, and enjoying the society of the two pleasant girls there, he found little time for being with his father. Indeed Osborne was too self-indulgent or ‘sensitive,’ as he termed it, to bear well with the squire’s gloomy fits, or too frequent querulousness. The consciousness of his secret, too, made Osborne uncomfortable in his father’s presence. It was very well for all parties that Roger was not ‘sensitive,’ for, if he had been, there were times when it would have been hard to bear little

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