Kenelm Eyrle had more than once looked at the large closed, solitary place, and thought how sad it was that it should go to decay. There were no widowed Ladies Eyrle to seek refuge there now, and the really good, substantial property was rapidly going to ruin. Owing to the size of his estate, and his own peculiar ideas, Kenelm had always employed a land agent, a gentleman of intelligence and shrewdness, who made The Towers one of the best paying estates in the country. If Mr. Gordon had any fault to find with his employer it was for the little interest he took in anything.
“I do not believe he would care,” said Mr. Gordon one day, “if we found a gold mine on the property. He would raise his eyebrows one-quarter of an inch and say, ‘Indeed!’ As for being pleased or excited over it—nothing of the kind.”
To Mr. Gordon a man who did not care for money was simply a blot on creation.
“I have sometimes been so successful,” he would say, “in different works on the estate, that Mr. Eyrle has found himself a thousand pounds the richer for it! But he never cared; he never seemed pleased. If, as has seldom happened, we have been unsuccessful, and have lost, it was just the same.”
But Mr. Gordon, like the sensible man that he was, had suggested one thing—it was the letting of the Dower House. “I know you dislike the idea of strangers about the property,” he said, “but it seems to me a sin to let such a beautiful place as that go to ruin.”
Mr. Eyrle smiled the melancholy smile that was so habitual with him.
“Go and live there yourself,” he replied, and Mr. Gordon gravely assured him that if he were not married there was no place he would prefer to it.
“Mrs. Gordon likes life. No spot suits her so well as the High street, Leeholme, or city upon it. The Dower House should not be empty. But, Mr. Eyrle, let me find a tenant for it.”
“It must be a tenant who does not bore me,” said Kenelm, indifferently, and he thought no more of the matter, until one morning he received a letter signed “J. Payton,” evidently written by a lady.
That letter interested him strangely.