e lanes out of
Crosber, with a large garden before it. A queer lonesome place
altogether. I should take it to be two or three hundred years old; and I
shouldn't think the house had had money spent upon it within the memory
of man. It's a dilapidated tumbledown old gazabo of a place, and yet
there's a kind of prettiness about it in summer-time, when the garden is
full of flowers. There's a river runs through some of the land about half
a mile from the house."

"What kind of a place is Crosber?"

"A bit of a village on the road from here to Portsmouth. The house I'm
telling you about is a mile from Crosber at the least, away from the main
road. There's two or three lanes or by-roads about there, and it lies in
one of them that turns sharp off by the Blue Boar, which is about the
only inn where you can bait a horse thereabouts."

"I'll ride over there to-morrow morning, and have a look at this queer
old house. You might give me the names of any other farms you know about
this neighbourhood, and their occupants."

This the landlord was very ready to do. He ran over the names of from ten
to fifteen places, which Gilbert jotted down upon a leaf of his
pocket-book, afterwards planning his route upon the map of the county
which he carried for his guidance. He set put early the next morning
under a low gray sky, with clouds in the distance that threatened rain.
The road from the little market-town to Crosber possessed no especial
beauty. The country was flat and uninteresting about here, and needed
the glory of its summer verdure to brighten and embellish it. But Mr.
Fenton did not give much thought to the scenes through which he went at
this time; the world around and about him was all of one colour--the
sunless gray which pervaded his own life. To-day the low dull sky and the
threatening clouds far away upon the level horizon harmonised well with
his own thoughts--with the utter hopelessness of his mind.
Hopelessness!--yes, that was the word. He had hazarded all upon this one
chance, and its failure was the shipwreck of his life. The ruin was
complete. He could not build up a new scheme of happiness. In the full
maturity of his manhood, his fate had come to him. He was not the kind of
man who can survive the ruin of his plans, and begin afresh with other
hopes and still fairer dreams. It was his nature to be constant. In all
his life he had chosen for himself only one friend--in all his life he
had loved but one woman.