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Never before had the fact that she was another man's wife come home to him so keenly. He tried to put the subject out of his thoughts, to forget that there had been a son born to the house of Granger; but often in the dreary spring twilight, walking among the oaks of Lyvedon, he had said to himself, "Her child ought to have been heir to this place."

If she who loved him so fondly, and was so full of prayers and hopes for his future, could have seen him so utterly on the wrong road, what bitter shame and lamenting there would have been in the halls of Lyvedon that day those deserted halls in which the lady sat alone among the sombre old-world grandeurs of oak and tapestry, and sighed for her absent son!

There is a good deal of charity for such offenders among the travelled classes, especially when the chief sinner is lord of such an estate as Lyvedon. Yet, varnish the picture how one will, dress up the story with what flowers of fancy one may, it is at best but a patched and broken business.

For a long time he had been going altogether the wrong way; leading a roving, desultory kind of existence; living amongst men whose habits and principles were worse than his own. He sent for his mother, and installed her as mistress of Lyvedon. The place and the position suited her to admiration.

Not again must they meet thus. She had a certain amount of strength of mind, but it was not inexhaustible, and she felt her weakness. "You forget that I have a son," she said at last, when he urged her to speak. "He shall be my son. Do you think I do not love that rosy yearling? He shall inherit Lyvedon, if you like; there is no entail; I can do what I please with it.

After this the lovers began to talk about themselves, or rather George Fairfax talked about himself, giving a detailed account of his proceedings since last they had met. "I went down to see my uncle," he said, "the day before yesterday. He is at Lyvedon, and I had a good look at the old house.

The place was a fine old place and it was undoubtedly a good thing to possess it; but George Fairfax had lived too wild a life to find happiness in the simple pleasures of a Kentish squire. So, after enduring the placid monotony of Lyvedon for a couple of months, he grew insufferably weary all at once, and told his mother that he was going to the Black Forest.

And in the event of her son's marriage, she must of course resign all this must make a new home for herself outside the walls of Lyvedon; for she was not a woman to accept a secondary place in any household. Considering the question merely from a selfish point of view, she had every reason to be satisfied with the existing state of things; but it was not of herself she thought.

"Is Lyvedon a very grand place?" "It is a fine estate, I believe; a noble old house in Kent, with considerable extent of land attached to it. The place belongs now to Sir Spencer Lyvedon, an old bachelor, whose only sister is George Fairfax's mother. The property is sure to come to Mr. Fairfax in a few years.

He received a summons to Lyvedon, and arrived there only in time to attend his uncle's death bed. The old man died, and was buried in the tomb of his forefathers a spacious vaulted chamber beneath Lyvedon church and George Fairfax reigned in his stead. Since his brother's death he had known that this was to be, and had accepted the fact as a matter of course.