The Johnsons were a family that had done well in the hardware business. They had, indeed, almost attained the dignity of county standing. Suddenly they fell upon evil times. As a result, Mr. Johnson’s name appeared in _The Gazette_. He had, however, one valuable asset in the person of his handsome daughter Mary. This young lady’s calm and dignified beauty eventually attracted, among her father’s north-country acquaintances, old Sir Joseph Mason, a desolate widower of Groby Park, Yorkshire, whose ambition it had always been to become the founder of a territorial line. His three daughters had all married well; each of them, together with their husbands, shared their father’s social aspirations. Such were some of the ready-made relatives by whom Mary Johnson, on giving her hand in marriage to Sir Joseph Mason, was to find herself surrounded. Though Sir Joseph Mason’s chief estate and principal country house lay to the north of the Trent, his favourite residence had long been the modest building in one of the home counties known as Orley Farm situated between twenty and thirty miles from London. At the time of his settlement at Orley Farm, Sir Joseph Mason’s son and heir by his first marriage, Joseph Mason junior, had almost reached the age of forty, when, to his chagrin and his nearest kith and kin’s disgust, his father’s second marriage bore fruit in the birth of a brother, Lucius Mason. The undoubted inheritor of the chief Mason property, Groby Park, Joseph Mason had always counted on possessing, on his father’s death, Orley Farm as well. When, however, old Sir Joseph’s will came to be read, it disclosed a codicil bequeathing Orley Farm to his infant son, Lucius. Another testamentary disposition equally unexpected was that of £2000 to Miriam Usbech, the daughter of that attorney, Jonathan Usbech, employed by Sir Joseph Mason to draft the Will with the codicil, round which the interest of the story centres. The provisions of that document, contested by the eldest son, had formed the subject of an action which he brought against Lady Mason before the novel begins. That had been decided in Lady Mason’s favour. The curtain thus rises on the late Sir Joseph’s eldest son, baffled by his step-mother in the effort legally to assert his ownership of the entire Mason property, and, by this failure, more keenly even than his sisters embittered against her. His half-brother, Lucius, now between twenty and twenty-five, having finished his education in a German university, has brought home with him scientific ideas of farming, and of land improvement generally, which are greatly to increase the value of the Orley Farm, whose master, on attaining his majority, he became. Meanwhile his half-brother, settled at the Yorkshire headquarters of the family, Groby, has held no intercourse with him. Sir Joseph Mason’s two sons have indeed always been strangers to each other.