never yet seen him in quite so odious a temper. This was already evident
at the time of the start from Pengarth, and thenceforward the cautious
Cumbrian preserved an absolute and watchful silence, to the great
annoyance of Melrose, who would have welcomed any excuse for ill-humour.
But as nothing beyond the curtest monosyllables were to be got out of his
companion, and as the rich beauty of the May landscape was entirely lost
upon himself, Melrose was reduced at last in the course of his ten miles'
drive to scanning once more the copy of the _Times_ which he had brought
with him from the south. The news of various strikes and industrial
arbitrations which it contained had already enraged him; and enraged him
again as he looked through it. The proletariat, in his opinion, must be
put down and kept down; that his own class began to show a lamentable
want of power to do either was the only public matter that ever really
troubled him. So far as his life was affected by the outside world at
all, except as a place where auctions took place, and dealers' shops
abounded, it was through this consciousness of impending social disaster,
this terror as of a rapidly approaching darkness bearing the doom of the
modern world in its bosom, which intermittently oppressed him, as it has
oppressed and still overshadows innumerable better men of our day.

At this moment, in the month of May, 190--, Edmund Melrose had just
passed his seventieth birthday. But the extraordinary energy and vivacity
of his good looks had scarcely abated since the time when, twenty-three
years before this date, Netta Smeath had first seen him in Florence;
although his hair had whitened, and the bronzed skin of the face had
developed a multitude of fine wrinkles that did but add to its character.
His aspect, even on the threshold of old age, had still something of the
magnificence of an Italian captain of the Renaissance, something also of
the pouncing, peering air that belongs to the type. He seemed indeed to
be always on the point of seizing or appropriating some booty or other.