very well with such of the good things of the world as had fallen to
their lot. And had the wife lived, such would probably have been the
case; for the Winterfields were known to be prudent people. But Mrs
Amedroz had died young, and things with Bernard Amedroz had gone badly.

And yet the evil had not been so much with him as with that terrible
boy of his. The father had been nearly forty when he married. He had
then never done any good; but as neither had he done much harm, the
friends of the family had argued well of his future career. After him,
unless he should leave a son behind him, there would be no Amedroz left
among the Quantock hills; and by some arrangement in respect to that
Winterfield money which came to him on his marriage the Winterfields
having a long-dated connexion with the Beltons of old the Amedroz
property was, at Bernard's marriage, entailed back upon a distant
Belton cousin, one Will Belton, whom no one had seen for many years,
but who was by blood nearer the squire in default of children of his
own than any other of his relatives. And now Will Belton was the heir
to Belton Castle; for Charles Amedroz, at the age of twenty-seven, had
found the miseries of the world to be too many for him, and had put an
end to them and to himself.

Charles had been a clever fellow a very clever fellow in the eyes of
his father. Bernard Amedroz knew that he himself was not a clever
fellow, and admired his son accordingly; and when Charles had been
expelled from Harrow for some boyish freak in his vengeance against a
neighbouring farmer, who had reported to the school authorities the
doings of a few beagles upon his land, Charles had cut off the heads of
all the trees in a young fir plantation his father was proud of the
exploit. When he was rusticated a second time from Trinity, and when
the father received an intimation that his son's name had better be