KATE GRENVILLE CHAPTER I SIXTY AND SIXTEEN JOHN GRENVILLE sat buried in thought in his library, the only room in the big house he had owned and occupied for twenty years, in which he felt thoroughly at home. He was sixty years old that day, and could look back upon the past with more satisfaction than falls to the lot of most of us. The inheritor of a good estate in the west country, and of honourable family traditions, gifted with unusual intelligence and power of application, he had made use of these advantages, not with a view to his own aggrandisement, but in accordance with his conception of duty. Of an amiable, affectionate, and retiring disposition, he had sought for happiness, and found it in the small circle of his family B and intimate friends, and saw without a particle of envy the rise of some dunces and not a few knaves to great positions, which they filled with much satisfaction to themselves under the comfortable conviction that success is the best of merit. But though, where possible, he would put a charitable construction on the conduct of others, occasions would arise in which all the barriers of reserve and shyness would break down. For faults, and even crimes of impulse, he would make ample allowance; but, once persuaded that a man had deliberately and in cold blood acted the part of a sneak, he would blaze out against the culprit with unrestrained invective. In this respect the lapse of years had left him absolutely unchanged, except that experience had taught him to barb the shafts of his denunciation with a keener point, and to aim them with more deadly effect. Nature had given him great facility in the use of language, and education and circumstances had combined to equip him with the faculty of expressing simply and with accuracy every shade of meaning. At Eton and at Cambridge he learnt steadily and well whatever task was set before him, was one |