"
One day, in an inattentive moment, the natives would suffer it to marry,
or find that in some disgraceful way it had caused the birth of children
unrecognised by law; and their respect for the accomplished fact, for
something that already lay in the past, would then prevent their trying
to unmarry it, or restoring the children to an unborn state, and very
gradually they would tolerate this intrusive brood. Such was the
process of Mr. Pendyce's mind. Indeed, like the spaniel John, a dog of
conservative instincts, at the approach of any strange thing he placed
himself in the way, barking and showing his teeth; and sometimes truly
he suffered at the thought that one day Horace Pendyce would no longer
be there to bark. But not often, for he had not much imagination.
All the morning he had been working at that old vexed subject of Common
Rights on Worsted Scotton, which his father had fenced in and taught him
once for all to believe was part integral of Worsted Skeynes. The matter
was almost beyond doubt, for the cottagers--in a poor way at the time
of the fencing, owing to the price of bread--had looked on apathetically
till the very last year required by law to give the old Squire
squatter's rights, when all of a sudden that man, Peacock's father, had
made a gap in the fence and driven in beasts, which had reopened the
whole unfortunate question.
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