to introduce Mr. Adrian Willes, by vocation
a composer and singer of songs, and--"contrapuntally," as he would
explain--Anthony Craford's housemate, monitor, land-agent, and man of
business.

Anthony sighed.

"I 'll tell you what I admire," he answered drily. "I admire the
transports of delight with which you hail my unexpected home-coming.
The last you knew, I was in California; and here I might have tumbled
from the skies."

Adrian regarded him with an eye in which, I think, kindled a certain
malicious satisfaction.

"Silence," he said, "is the perfectest herald of joy. Besides, you
must n't flatter yourself that your home-coming is so deucedly
unexpected, either. I 've felt a pricking in my thumbs any time these
three months; and no longer ago than yesterday morning, I said to my
image in the glass, as I was shaving, 'I should n't wonder if Tony
turned up to-morrow,' said I."

"That was merely your uneasy conscience," Tony expounded. "When the
cat's away, the mice are always feeling prickings in their thumbs."

"Oh, if you stoop to bandying proverbs," retaliated Adrian, "there's a
proverb about a penny." He raised his bunch of poppies, and posed it
aloft before him, eyeing it, his head cocked a little to one side, in
critical enjoyment. "Shall we set out for the house?" he asked.

"No," said Anthony, promptly, with decision. "_I 'll_ set out for the
house; and _you_ (unless your habits have strangely altered) will frisk
and gambol round about me. Come on."

And taking Adrian's arm, he led the way, amid the summer throng of
delicate scents and sounds, under the opulent old trees, over the
gold-green velvet of the turf, on which leaves and branches were
stencilled by the sun, as in an elaborate design for lace, towards a
house that was rather famous in the neighbourhood--I was on the point
of saying for its beauty: but are things ever famous in English
neighbourhoods for their mere beauty?--for its quaintness, and in some
measure too, perhaps, for its history:--Craford Old Manor, a red-brick
Tudor house, low, and, in the rectangular style of such houses,
rambling; with a paved inner court, and countless tall chimneys, like
minarets; with a secret chapel and a priests' "hiding-hole," for the
Crafords were one of those old Catholic families whose boast it is that
they "have never lost the Faith"; with a walled formal garden, and a
terrace, and a sun-dial; with close-cropped bordures of box, and yews