growing tired of his own company in the guest-room,
accepted Sir Charles' invitation with alacrity; and they walked down
from the Abbey to the village of Malford, which was situated at the
confluence of the Mall and the Nodder, two diminutive tributaries of the
Wey, which itself is not a mighty stream.

"A rather charming village, don't you think?" said Sir Charles, pointing
with his tasselled cane to a particularly attractive rose-hung cottage.
"It was lucky that the railway missed us by a couple of miles; we should
have been festering with tin bungalows by now on any available land,
which means on any land that doesn't belong to me. I don't offer to show
you the church, because I never enter it."

Mark had paused as a matter of course by the lychgate, supposing that
with a squire like Sir Charles the inside should be of unusual interest.

"My uncle most outrageously sold the advowson to the Simeon Trustees, it
being the only part of my inheritance he could alienate from me, whom he
loathed. He knew nothing would enrage me more than that, and the result
is that I've got a fellow as vicar who preaches in a black gown and has
evening communion twice a month. That is why I took such pleasure in
planting a monastery in the parish; and if only that old time-server the
Bishop of Silchester would licence a chaplain to the community, I should
get my Sunday Mass in my own parish despite my uncle's simeony, as I
call it. As it is with Burrowes away all the time raising funds, I don't
get a Mass at the Abbey and I have to go to the next parish, which is
four miles away and appears highly undignified for the squire."

"And you can't get him out?" said Mark.

"If I did get him out, I should be afflicted with another one just as
bad. The Simeon Trustees only appoint people of the stamp of Mr.
Choules, my present enemy. He's a horrid little man with a gaunt wife
six feet high who beats her children and, if village gossip be true, her
husband as well. Now you can see Malford Place, which is let to
Middlesborough, as I told you."

Mark looked at the great Georgian house with its lawns and cedars and
gateposts surmounted by stone wyverns. He had seen many of these great
houses in the course of his tramping; but he had never thought of them
before except as natural features in the landscape; the idea that people
could consider a gigantic building like that as much a home as the small
houses in which Mark had spent his life came ove