While the events recorded in the last chapter had been taking place, Robert Streightley had been down to Middlemeads to give the necessary orders for the immediate reduction of the establishment there. It was an act over which a great many people would have been sillily sentimental, but one which affected Robert Streightley very little indeed. The stately old mansion had never been his home, though it had contained his wife and his household gods; he had never had the same regard for it as for the dingy Brixton villa, where every thing was so old and mean and common. Even when he first bought the place, and inhabited it in the early days of his wedded life, long before the falseness of his position and the cha............