On the day after the reading of the will, Henry Indefer Jones, Esq., of Llanfeare, as he was now to be called, was left alone in his house, his cousin Isabel having taken her departure from the place in the manner proposed by her. And the lawyer was gone, and the doctor, and the tenants² did not come near him, and the butler and the housekeeper³ kept out of his way, and there was probably no man in all South Wales more lonely and desolate⁴ than the new Squire⁵ of Llanfeare on that morning.

The cruelty of it, the injustice⁶ of it, the unprecedented⁷ hardness of it all! Such were the ideas which presented themselves to him as hour after hour he sat in the book-room with his eyes fixed⁸ on the volume of Jeremy Taylor's sermons. He had done nothing wrong,—so he told himself,—had not even coveted⁹ anything that did not belong to him. It was in accordance with his uncle's expressed desire that he had come to Llanfeare, and been introduced to the tenants as their future landlord, and had taken upon himself the place of the heir. Then the old man had announced to him his change of mind; but had not announced it to others, had not declared his altered purpose to the world at Llanfeare, and had not at once sent him back to his London office. Had he done so, that would have been better. There would have been a gross injustice, but that would have been the end of it, and he would have gone back to his London work unhappy indeed, but with some possibility of life before him. Now it seemed as though any mode of living would be impossible to him. While that fatal paper remained hidden in the fatal volume he could do nothing but sit there and guard it in solitude¹⁰.

He knew well enough that it behoved him as a man to go out about the estate and the neighbourhood, and to show himself, and to take some part in the life around him, even though he might be

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