By the Old Surgeon



It was apparently an idea, rather than a passion, that inspired Lord
Uplandtowers' resolve to win her. Nobody ever knew when he formed
it, or whence he got his assurance of success in the face of her
manifest dislike of him. Possibly not until after that first
important act of her life which I shall presently mention. His
matured and cynical doggedness at the age of nineteen, when impulse
mostly rules calculation, was remarkable, and might have owed its
existence as much to his succession to the earldom and its
accompanying local honours in childhood, as to the family character;
an elevation which jerked him into maturity, so to speak, without
his having known adolescence. He had only reached his twelfth year
when his father, the fourth Earl, died, after a course of the Bath
waters.

Nevertheless, the family character had a great deal to do with it.
Determination was hereditary in the bearers of that escutcheon;
sometimes for good, sometimes for evil.

The seats of the two families were about ten miles apart, the way
between them lying along the now old, then new, turnpike-road
connecting Havenpool and Warborne with the city of Melchester: a
road which, though only a branch from what was known as the Great
Western Highway, is probably, even at present, as it has been for
the last hundred years, one of the finest examples of a macadamized
turnpike-track that can be found in England.