IX.-A BRANCH IS LOPPED FROM THE FAMILY TREE, X.-WILFRED MANWARING GOES INTO EXILE, ALL the morning of that particular 8th of November upon which some of the events of the ensuing story began, a dense fog had been brooding over the Essex marshes. The silence of those gloomy expanses of faded yellow grass and brown slime, deposited by earlier autumnal floods, was deep and oppressive, and was only broken at times by the cough of a footsore sheep as it gnawed at a half-rotten turnip brought wearily down in creaking wains from the sodden uplands, by the distrustful low of a bullock surprised by the sudden apparition of a fellow-animal of the same species B |