What did
they want with gamekeepers now? Who would ever shoot at Tallyn again?
With impatience she felt herself entangled in the endless machinery of
wealth and the pleasures of wealth, so easy to set in motion, and so
difficult to stop, even when all the savor has gone out of it. She was
a tired, broken woman, with an invalid son; and the management of her
great property, in which her capacities and abilities had taken for so
long an imperious and instinctive delight, had become a mere burden. She
longed to creep into some quiet place, alone with Oliver, out of reach
of this army of servants and dependents, these impassive and
unresponsive faces.
The crunching of the carriage wheels on the gravel outside gave her a
start of something like pleasure. Among the old friends there was no one
now she cared so much to see as Sir James Chide. Sir James had lately
left Parliament and politics, and had taken a judgeship. She understood
that he had lost interest in politics after and in consequence of John
Ferrier's death; and she knew, of course, that he had refused the
Attorney-Generalship, on the ground of the treatment meted out to his
old friend and chief.
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