have tents pitched for the
haymakers--the house would not hold a tithe of the folk, I am sure."

She led me on to the door, murmuring little above her breath as she did
so, "The earth and the growth of it and the life of it! If I could but
say or show how I love it!"

We went in, and found no soul in any room as we wandered from room to
room,--from the rose-covered porch to the strange and quaint garrets
amongst the great timbers of the roof, where of old time the tillers and
herdsmen of the manor slept, but which a-nights seemed now, by the small
size of the beds, and the litter of useless and disregarded
matters--bunches of dying flowers, feathers of birds, shells of
starling's eggs, caddis worms in mugs, and the like--seemed to be
inhabited for the time by children.

Everywhere there was but little furniture, and that only the most
necessary, and of the simplest forms. The extravagant love of ornament
which I had noted in this people elsewhere seemed here to have given
place to the feeling that the house itself and its associations was the
ornament of the country life amidst which it had been left stranded from
old times, and that to re-ornament it would but take away its use as a
piece of natural beauty.

We sat down at last in a room over the wall which Ellen had caressed, and
which was still hung with old tapestry, originally of no artistic value,
but now faded into pleasant grey tones which harmonised thoroughly well
with the quiet of the place, and which would have been ill supplanted by
brighter and more striking decoration.

I asked a few random questions of Ellen as we sat there, but scarcely
listened to her answers, and presently became silent, and then scarce
conscious of anything, but that I was there in that old room, the doves
crooning from the roofs of the barn and dovecot beyond the window
opposite to me.

My thought returned to me after what I think was but a minute or two, but
which, as in a vivid dream, seemed as if it had lasted a long time, when
I saw Ellen sitting, looking all the fuller of life and pleasure and
desire from the contrast with the grey faded tapestry with its futile
design, which was now only bearable because it had grown so faint and
feeble.

She looked at me kindly, but as if she read me through and through. She
said: "You have begun again your never-ending contrast between the past
and this present. Is it not so?"

"True," said I. "I was thinking of what you, wit