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unhappy; but above and beneath her firmly modelled cheeks and rugged cheek-bones those quaintly indented creases were extremely marked, whose contractions, according to Mary, were an indication that there was trouble in the wind. Lawyer Didlington with sedate pontifical gravity sat on a high chair with his back to the largest window. Not a glance did he give at that gracious lawn, across the smooth surface of which the long afternoon shadows from lime-tree and cedar-tree were already falling.
    Close to the lawyer's table, and taking not much more notice of the shadows on the lawn than he did, sat at another table, with writing materials ostentatiously displayed in front of them, Dave Spear and Persephone Spear. It might have been supposed that this young couple were desperately transcribing every detail of the late Rector's will; but this would have been an erroneous supposition. The papers which lay before them had been extracted from a battered leather case which now reposed on the carpet at their feet. The calculations upon which they were so absorbingly engaged, and which entailed the passing across the little table of all manner of pencil scrawls, had not the very remotest connection with what Mr. Didlington was reading with such careful and explanatory unction; unless indeed all human activities of a revolutionary character are to be regarded as having a relation lo the rights of property.
    Persephone Spear and her husband had in fact just come from a communistic meeting at Leeds and were proceeding to another one at Norwich before returning to Bristol where they lived. This matter of consigning Persephone's grandfather to his native Norfolk clay would not have allured them from a mile off if it had not been for the fact that there was the possibility of a strike just then at one of Philip's Somersetshire factories. Feeling a family interest in this event they had naturally got into touch with the leaders of the strike and were doing their best not only to give the event a communistic turn but also to use the accident of their relationship with him to win concessions from Philip
    It was a faint amusement to Miss Elizabeth, even in the midst of her sad thoughts, to observe how curiously unlike each other these two young revolutionaries were, and yet what a perfect unanimity existed between them. Spear was a short, humorous, broad-faced youth, with closely cropped fair hair and small, merry, blue eyes; while Percy was a tall, lanky maid of a brownish, gipsy-like complexion and with a mop of dusky curls.
    Mr. Philip Crow himself had been, until the lawyer actually commenced reading, moving, like the energetic diplomat he was, from one to another of all these relatives; and even now, while everybody else was seated, he stood with alert, polite attention, leaning against the side of the big window with his back to the lawn and keeping his eyes fixed upon the old-world physiognomy of Mr. Anthony Didlington. No one could have denied to Philip Crow the epithet of handsome. He was indeed the only thoroughly good-looking one of all the assembled relatives; but his good looks were attended with so little self-consciousness and were so completely subordinate to his formidable character that they played a very minor part in the effect he produced. The man drove himself—you could see that in his hawk's nose, his compressed lips, his narrowed eyelids, his twitching brows—but he drove others yet more inflexibly, as was apparent from the roving intensity of his grey eyes, the eyes of a pilot, a harpooner, a big-game hunter—in a word, of a Norman adventurer who took, kept, organised, constructed; and who moulded sans pitie weaker natures to his far-sighted purpose.
    John and Mary were so absorbed in whispering to each other as first one memory and then another stole into their minds out of the aura of that old room, some associated with the view outside the window, some with the furniture, some with the figures of their