"They say that he run through all the money, as was his by rights, up in London in fast living," said the parish clerk, gravely.
"May be," said the miller, curtly. "If fast living means open-handed living, it's like enough; he never could keep a shilling when he was a boy, the first tramp as passed had it, safe as a gun. What's bred in the bone must come out in the flesh. Here's to the new squire--if it be Master Jack," and the sturdy old man raised his glass and emptied its contents at one vigorous but steady pull.
Meanwhile the subject of the discussion paced to and fro, pulling at his brier, and indulging in a study of the brownest description.
Never perhaps in his life had Jack been so upset, so serious and so sobered.
In the first place the sudden--or rather sudden to Jack--death of the old man with whom he had lived and quarreled as a boy, affected him more deeply than even he was aware. There in the silent room in the inn, he recalled all the old man's good qualities, all the little kindnesses he had done him, Jack, and more than all, the few last solemn and quite unexpectedly affectionate words which had dropped from his dying lips.
Jack, puffing at his pipe and rubbing his short hair with a puzzled frown, went over the scene again and again, and with no mercenary thoughts of the old man's declaration that he had remembered Jack in his will, but with reference to the mysterious allusions in the disposal of the large part of the property; then Jack's mind would fly off to the fearful scene at the actual death.
The wild cry, the white and horrified face of Stephen, the puzzled and sternly questioning one of the old lawyer. What did it mean?
And still more mysterious, what was the meaning of Stephen's conduct on the lawn? What was he hunting for with such intense eagerness as to make him fly at Jack like a madman?
Jack--as no doubt the reader will have surmised--was not clever.
He could not piece this and that together, and from disjointed incidents form an intelligent whole, as a child does with a box of puzzles.
The whole thing was a mystery to him, and grew more confusing and bewildering the more he thought of it.
It takes a villain thoroughly to appreciate a villain, a thief to understand and catch a thief; and Jack, being neither one nor the other, utterly failed to understand Stephen.