town. The town itself was divided in twain by a river,
the river spanned by a bridge which had a certain fame from the fact of
its having been the scene of a brave stand and a terrible slaughter
during the civil wars after Charles I. had set up his standard at
Nottingham. To be sure there was not much left of the genuine old bridge
on which the fight was fought, nor did the broad, flat, handsome, and
altogether modern structure bear much resemblance to the sort of bridge
which might have crossed a river in the days of the Cavaliers. Residents
of Keeton always, however, boasted of the fact that one of the arches of
the bridge was just the same underneath as it had always been, and
insisted on bringing the stranger down by devious and grassy paths to
the river's edge in order that he might see for himself the old stones
still holding together which had perhaps been shaken by the tramp of
Rupert's troopers. On the park side of the bridge lay the genteeler and
more pretentious houses, the semi-detached villas and lodges and
crescents of Keeton; and there too were the humbler cottages. On the
other side of the bridge were the business streets and the clustering
shops, most of them old-fashioned and dark, with low, beetling fronts
and narrow panes in the windows, and only here and there a showy and
modern establishment, with its stucco front and its plate glass. The
streets were all so narrow that they seemed as if they must be only
passages leading to broader thoroughfares. The stranger walked on and
on, thinking he was coming to the actual town of Dukes-Keeton, until he
walked out at the other side and found he had left it behind him.

Minola Grey crossed the bridge, although her own home lay on the side
nearest the park, and made her way through the narrow streets. She
glanced with a shudder at one formal official looking house of dark
brick which she had to pass, and the door of which bore a huge brass
plate with the words "Sheppard & Sheppard, Solicitors and Land Agents."
Another expression of dislike or pain crossed her handsome, pale, and
emotional face when she passed a little lane, closed at the further end
by the heavy, sombre front of a chapel, for it was there that she had
even still to pass some trying, unsympathetic hours of the Sunday
listening to a preacher whose eloquence was rather too familiar to her
all the week. At length she passed the front of a large building of
light-colored stone, with a Greek portico