Come and see the Hall, old fellow. It will be our last chance, for the
squire and his sister come back this afternoon. I must parochialise a
bit afterwards, but you shan't be much victimised.'

Langham submitted, and they sallied forth. It was a soft rainy morning,
one of the first heralds of autumn. Gray mists were drifting silently
across the woods and the wide stubbles of the now shaven cornfield,
where white lines of reapers were at work, as the morning cleared,
making and stacking the sheaves. After a stormy night the garden was
strewn with _debris_, and here and there noiseless prophetic showers of
leaves were dropping on the lawn.

Elsmere took his guest along a bit of common, where great black junipers
stood up like magnates in council above the motley undergrowth of fern
and heather, and then they turned into the park. A great stretch of
dimpled land it was, falling softly towards the south and west, bounded
by a shining twisted river, and commanding from all its highest points a
heathery world of distance, now turned a stormy purple under the
drooping fringes of the rain clouds. They walked downwards from the
moment of entering it, till at last, when they reached a wooded plateau
about a hundred feet above the river, the house itself came suddenly
into view.

That was a house of houses! The large main building, as distinguished
from the lower stone portions to the north which represented a fragment
of the older Elizabethan house, had been in its day the crown and boast
of Jacobean house-architecture. It was fretted and jewelled with
Renaissance terra-cotta work from end to end; each gable had its lace
work, each window its carved setting. And yet the lines of the whole
were so noble, genius had hit the general proportions so finely, that no
effect of stateliness or grandeur had been missed through all the
accumulation of ornament. Majestic relic of a vanished England, the
house rose amid the August woods rich in every beauty that site, and
wealth, and centuries could give to it. The river ran about it as though
it loved it. The cedars which had kept it company for well-nigh two
centuries gathered proudly round it; the deer grouped themselves in the
park beneath it, as though they were conscious elements in a great whole
of loveliness.

The two friends were admitted by a housemaid who happened to be busy in
the hall, and whose red cheeks and general breathlessness bore witness
to the energy of the storm of