The land on which, as Squire Wynne had told Edward Garden, other mortgages were being foreclosed, began a furlong or so behind the unfinished house, reaching to and including one of the farms—Fotty, John Pritchard's. It formed a three-hundred-yards-wide strip of bents and rough grazing, which spread out inland with Fotty in the middle of its base. The mortgagee was Squire Wynne's Liverpool wine-merchant, and he had accepted the mortgage partly because he did not wish to be at cross-purposes with such of Squire Wynne's friends as were good customers of his, and partly because he was not very likely to get anything else in settlement of a longish account. This account had been reckoned off the sum advanced, which, besides, was based on a low valuation; and, not wanting the land himself, he was ready enough to sell to any optimist who did.

The land remained in the possession of the wine-merchant for exactly eleven weeks. At the end of that time he had found his optimist in the person of Terry Armfield.

And who was Terry Armfield, that his affairs should thus become mixed up with those of Llanyglo?

Well, the name of one of his grandfathers, which need not be mentioned, is to be found, in certain circumstances of notoriety, in Gomer Williams's History of the Liverpool Privateers; and that of his father is associated with the bright story of the tea-clippers. Thus a certain adventurousness in Terry may perhaps be accounted for. But whence the rest of him derived was a mystery. Belated young Tractarians who burn incense in their monastic bedrooms were no more common in Liverpool then than they are to-day. In appearance, Terry was an ill-adjusted compromise between an ascetic and a young man about town. He was tall and of a buoyant movement, excellently dressed, had burning and ecstatic brown eyes, and was possessed of an extraordinary power of impressing people as long as, and even a little longer than, he was actually in their presence. This was all very well as long as he spoke only of pictures that this self-made merchant ought to buy, or of books without which some shipper's newly formed library would be incomplete. He really knew a little about these things, as also he did about architecture and engravings, vestments and Ritualism and furniture. The trouble began when he went beyond them. Wealthy business men, looking up as Terry lounged into their offices, would put up their hands defensively, cry, "It's no good, Terry—I won't listen," but would presently find themselves listening none the less. It was not that Terry was plausible. Plausible was not the word. He persuaded you only because he was, for the time being, overwhelmingly persuaded himself. His capacity for enthusiasm was astonishing. Circumstances having driven him from his true vocation (the Church) into business, he traded as it were under Letters of Marque that had had an apostolic blessing. House-property, leases, patents, picture-exhibitions, concessions, bills for discount, Irish-harvester agencies, philanthropy on a paying basis, and a hundred even vaguer values—some idealistic strain in Terry so moved the dullard-on-the-make that he had a new light on business as a benison, and on money-making as something nobler than he had supposed. What such an one commonly lacked, Terry was full and running over with; and the end of the matter frequently was that it was judged to be worth a certain amount of risk to be on the side of Terry and the angels.

Of course, Terry ought to have been locked up as a public danger. Anybody but Terry would have been locked up. But you cannot lock innocence and rapturous good faith up. Terry, if you had locked him up, would merely have sent for his crucifix, plunged into fresh scheming, and would have come out again as running over with piracies and the humanities as ever.

So Terry Armfield, who hitherto had never heard of Llanyglo and of whom Llanyglo had never heard, took over Fotty and the strip of land that ran down to Edward Garden's unfinished house, with, as it happened, extremely notable results.

For nobody who knew Terry ever supposed that he made purchases of real estate solely upon his own account. He represented others; and it is perhaps significant that the nickname by which he was known among the members of the Syndicate which made use of him was borrowed from the slang of the "swell mob." He was called "The Minder."

Now the Minder, as you ought not to know, is the gentleman who makes himself charming to you while the others consult about how much you may be worth, and how you may most conveniently be made worth less. Often, like Terry, he himself is not in the real councils of his allies. They want his looks, his candours, his repute, his address, and in Terry's case they especially wanted his powers remarkable of persuasion. Until it should be decided what people were to be persuaded of, Terry minded.

Little did John Pritchard, tenant-farmer of Fotty, dream of the solicitude with which his farm was regarded by a number of people who had never seen it and did not want ever to see it. Little did he think that that middling oat-bearing land was being minded and brooded upon. Little did he imagine what interest, what benevolence, what affectionate regard ... or, to put it in plain English, he had no notion whatever that, instead of having Squire Wynne for a landlord, he was now the tenant of a set of prospectus-vendors of whom two or three were the same men who had held those hopeful views on the paying-quantities of manganese that could be obtained from that other property of Squire Wynne's, the Abercelyn mines, thirty miles further down the coast.

The Corporation did not insist on manganese or on anything else. On the contrary, it was accommodating in the extreme. You paid your money and took your choice what commodity you found on its properties; you could have had tin, iron, copper, lead, anything you happened to fancy. It merely wished to be able to show, in case of need, its indefeasible title to real land, at Llanyglo or anywhere else, but the further from civilisation the better. It would be safer, and really not much dearer, to buy Pritchard's farm, than it would be to have to confess in open Court that the tin or iron or lead shares of which it was trying to create the value, unfortunately happened to have Pritchard's farm sitting on the top of them.

"No, we'd better get hold of a bit of real land from somewhere," the Syndicate had said. "Better have it in a new name too. All Abercelyn names exempt for three years. Who is there?... What about Armfield?"

All had agreed that Terry would make an excellent Minder.

When, in course of time, the Syndicate first heard from Terry (who heard it goodness knows where) that "glo" was the Welsh word for "coal," it was on the point of plumping for coal without further question.

"What more do you want?" it asked itself. "'Glo'—'coal'; there you are. Place-name. Awful lot in a genuine place-name. Find it on an old map, to show that we didn't invent it, and the whole thing settles itself. There's bound to be coal. Sure to be. They didn't call it that for nothing. All ground's got something in it. I say coal. On the face of it. It seems to me Providential. (Shut up, Abercelyn; we're talking about Llanyglo now.) ... Who says coal, then?" ...

But Llanyglo was not destined to be a colliery village. Latticed shaft-heads were not to rise under the Trwyn, nor men to descend in cages to the galleries deep under the sandhills. Edward Garden's house was not to become a mine-manager's residence, nor a coal-quay to be constructed where the wooden jetty stuck out like a stumpy thumb into the sea.—Nevertheless, it almost looked at one time as if it might have been so.

The Syndicate's registered offices were within a hundred yards of Lime Street Station, and Terry, looking forth from an upper window, could see the august portico of St. George's Hall and the cabs and steam-trams running to and fro past it. He sat day by day at a high sloping desk, perched on a tall stool. A small pile of letters lay by his side, weighted with a surveyor's reel-tape, and on a shelf above the press with the dumb-bell arm, thrust among directories and files, were Stones of Venice and The Christian Year. There was a green cardboard shade on the double-elbowed gas-bracket, and on the wall near it hung an ebony-edged T-square and a number of French curves. There was a second stool for callers, and in a small outer office a youth of sixteen read The Boys of London and New York and chewed root-liquorice. The place was shabby, as befitted a hole-in-corner enterprise, but Terry saw not that shabbiness. He had splendour enough in his own visions. He did not look very busy, but he was. A dozen inspired and half-baked schemes fermented in his head, and besides these, he was minding Llanyglo—the thyme and wild pansies and butterflies of its sandhills, the glaucous blue sea-holly of its shore, its heathery Trwyn, its coal or what-not underfoot, and its crystal air overhead—especially its crystal air overhead....