Mr. Penton’s long interview with the young solicitor had ended in this:--and though it did not seem exactly a settlement of the question, it had been taken for granted by both families as such--that he consented to treat with Sir Walter Penton. The terms might take a longer time to arrange, and there were conditions--some of a rather peculiar character, as his opponents thought--which Mr. Penton insisted upon. But upon the general question he was supposed to have yielded. It had taken him a great deal of thought, and he was not happy about it. He went about the house and his few fields with a moody countenance, avoiding every turn or point of view which revealed Penton--those points of view which had once been his happiness. This fact alone took a great deal of the pleasure out of his life. It had been his relief in former days to mount the road to that corner where the view was, or to go out and sit on the bench under the poplar-tree; but now he turned his back upon these favorite places. When he was low he had no longer this way of escaping from himself. Of all points of the compass, that on which Penton lay had become the most distasteful to him. He would have liked to have had it blotted out from the landscape altogether: there was nothing but pain in the sight of it, in the mere knowledge that it was there. And winter is cruel in this particular. It spares you nothing--not even a chimney. The weather-cock, glowing through the bare trees, seemed to catch every ray of light and blazon it over the whole country; the windows that faced the south were in a perpetual scintillation. The great house would not be hidden; it made no account of the feelings of those who were in the act of parting with it forever; though its aspect was now a reproach and humiliation to them instead of a pride, it seemed to force itself more and more on their eyes. Walter felt this almost more strongly than his father, if that were possible. He, too, went about moody, with the air of a man injured, turning his back on the once favorite quarter where the sunset was. He said in his haste that he never wanted to see a sunset again, and when the girls called his attention to all the stormy gorgeous colors of the winter afternoon, would turn his back upon them and declare that the reflection in the river, the secondary tints in the cold gray of the east, were enough for him. He said this with a vehemence which his father did not display. But Walter had solaces and alleviations of which his father was incapable; and Mr. Penton was the one who felt it most deeply after all. In his middle-aged bosom the tide of life was not running high. He had few pleasures; even few wishes. It no longer moved him in his habitual self-restraint that he had no horses, no means of keeping his place among his peers. All that had dropped away from him in the chill of custom--in that acceptance of the inevitable which is the lowest form of content. But there had always been Penton in which his imagination could take refuge. Penton was still an earthly paradise into which one day or other he should find entrance, which nobody could close from him. And now that too was closed, and his fancy could no longer go in and dwell there. He said very little about it, but he felt it to the bottom of his heart. It was the sort of thing of which he might have died had the floods been out or the atmosphere as deleterious as it sometimes was; but happily it was not an exceptionally wet season, and the river had not as yet been “out” that year.