His attempt to find the real arsonist leads him to wonder if one of his newly alcoholic parents could have committed the torchings.

[T]he inmates of the coach, by numerous hard, painful joltings, and ponderous, dragging trundlings, are suddenly made sensible of some great change in the character of the road.

And so it had always pleased M. Stutz to expect great things from the dark young man whom he had first seen in his early twenties ; and his expectations had waxed rather than waned on hearing the faint bruit of the love of Ivor and Virginia—for Virginia, M. Stutz thought, would bring fineness to a point in a man like Ivor Marlay, […].

As the cold, moist dawns beckoned the day with the bestial howling of the Manor lapdogs, the farm-people, passing from the sensuality of their beds, went with melancholy brow and bowed neck to the fields of their stoic endeavour and the venereal cows would moo dolorously and persistently as they caught of the heavy jaws of these their tenders. Sad, but self-reliant, these erotic mortals were models of farmly perseverence and, slow and steady, their emerald eyes would survey their property and even smile.