o a point through which they saw the house through a
break in the trees, this last was the final touch of all. It was a great
place, stately in its masses of grey stone to which thick ivy clung.
To Bettina it seemed that a hundred windows stared at her with closed,
blind eyes. All were shuttered but two or three on the lower floors. Not
one showed signs of life. The silent stone thing stood sightless among
all of which it was dead master--rolling acres, great trees, lost
gardens and deserted groves.

"Oh!" she sighed, "Oh!"

Her companion stood still and leaned upon his gun again, looking as he
had looked before.

"Some of it," he said, "was here before the Conquest. It belonged to
Mount Dunstans then."

"And only one of them is left," she cried, "and it is like this!"

"They have been a bad lot, the last hundred years," was the surly
liberty of speech he took, "a bad lot."

It was not his place to speak in such manner of those of his master's
house, and it was not the part of Miss Vanderpoel to encourage him by
response. She remained silent, standing perhaps a trifle more lightly
erect as she gazed at the rows of blind windows in silence.

Neither of them uttered a word for some time, but at length Bettina
roused herself. She had a six-mile walk before her and must go.

"I am very much obliged to you," she began, and then paused a second.
A curious hesitance came upon her, though she knew that under ordinary
circumstances such hesitation would have been totally out of place. She
had occupied the man's time for an hour or more, he was of the working
class, and one must not be guilty of the error of imagining that a man
who has work to do can justly spend his time in one's service for the
mere pleasure of it. She knew what custom demanded. Why should she
hesitate before this man, with his not too courteous, surly face. She
felt slightly irritated by her own unpractical embarrassment as she put
her hand into the small, latched bag at her belt.

"I am very much obliged, keeper," she said. "You have given me a
great deal of your time. You know the place so well that it has been
a pleasure to be taken about by you. I have never seen anything so
beautiful--and so sad. Thank you--thank you." And she put a goldpiece
in his palm.

His fingers closed over it quietly. Why it was to her great relief she
did not know--because something in the simple act annoyed her, even
while she congratulated herself that her hesitance