of a newspaper upon his table. '_Illustrated England_,' he
muttered, his thoughts half away; and he fell to wondering how it had
come into the house. 'Father O'Grady must have left it,' he said, and
began to unroll the paper. But while unrolling it he stopped. Half his
mind was still away, and he sat for fully ten minutes lost in sad
sensations, and it was the newspaper slipping from his hand that awoke
him. The first thing that caught his eye on opening the paper was an
interview with Mr. Walter Poole, embellished with many photographs of
Beechwood Hall.

'Did O'Grady leave this paper here for me to read,' he asked himself,
'or did he forget to take it away with him? We talked of so many things
that he may have forgotten it, forgotten even to mention it. How very
strange!'

The lodge gates and the long drive, winding between different woods,
ascending gradually to the hilltop on which Beechwood Hall was placed by
an early eighteenth-century architect, seemed to the priest to be
described with too much unction by the representative of _Illustrated
England_. To the journalist Beechwood Hall stood on its hill, a sign and
symbol of the spacious leisure of the eighteenth century and the long
tradition that it represented, one that had not even begun to drop into
decadence till 1850, a tradition that still existed, despite the fact
that democracy was finding its way into the agricultural parts of
England. The journalist was impressed, perhaps unduly impressed, by the
noble hall and the quiet passages that seemed to preserve a memory of
the many generations that had passed through them on different errands,
now all hushed in the family vault.

Father Oliver looked down the column rapidly, and it was not until the
footman who admitted the journalist was dismissed by the butler, who
himself conducted the journalist to the library, that Father Oliver
said: 'We have at last arrived at the castle of learning in which the
great Mr. Poole sits sharpening the pen which is to slay Christianity.
But Christianity will escape Mr. Poole's pen. It, has outlived many such
attacks in the past. We shall see, however, what kind of nib he uses,
fine or blunt?' The journalist followed the butler down the long library
overlooking green sward to a quiet nook, if he might venture to speak
of Mr. Walter Poole's study as a quiet nook. It seemed to surprise him
that Mr. Walter Poole should rise from his writing-table and come
forward to meet him, a