unt was for a day or
so measurably awestricken by this exploit in purchase, and we both went
down with him to see the house in a mood near consternation. It struck
us then as a very lordly place indeed. I remember the three of
us standing on the terrace that looked westward, surveying the
sky-reflecting windows of the house, and a feeling of unwarrantable
intrusion comes back to me.

Lady Grove, you know, is a very beautiful house indeed, a still and
gracious place, whose age-long seclusion was only effectively broken
with the toot of the coming of the motor-car. An old Catholic family
had died out in it, century by century, and was now altogether
dead. Portions of the fabric are thirteenth century, and its last
architectural revision was Tudor; within, it is for the most part dark
and chilly, save for two or three favoured rooms and its tall-windowed,
oak-galleried hall. Its terrace is its noblest feature; a very wide,
broad lawn it is, bordered by a low stone battlement, and there is
a great cedar in one corner under whose level branches one looks out
across the blue distances of the Weald, blue distances that are made
extraordinarily Italian in quality by virtue of the dark masses of that
single tree. It is a very high terrace; southward one looks down upon
the tops of wayfaring trees and spruces, and westward on a steep slope
of beechwood, through which the road comes. One turns back to the still
old house, and sees a grey and lichenous facade with a very finely
arched entrance. It was warmed by the afternoon light and touched with
the colour of a few neglected roses and a pyracanthus. It seemed to me
that the most modern owner conceivable in this serene fine place
was some bearded scholarly man in a black cassock, gentle-voiced and
white-handed, or some very soft-robed, grey gentlewoman. And there was
my uncle holding his goggles in a sealskin glove, wiping the glass with
a pocket-handkerchief, and asking my aunt if Lady Grove wasn't a "Bit of
all Right."

My aunt made him no answer.

"The man who built this," I speculated, "wore armour and carried a
sword."

"There's some of it inside still," said my uncle.

We went inside. An old woman with very white hair was in charge of the
place and cringed rather obviously to the new master. She evidently
found him a very strange and frightful apparition indeed, and was
dreadfully afraid of him. But if the surviving present bowed down to
us, the past did not. We stood