an church. You
have left the brick of the southern and eastern counties behind you,
and everything is stone--stone for the walls, and lichened slabs of
stone for the roofs. It is all grim and solid and massive, as befits
the heart of a great nation.

It was in the middle of this country, not very far from Evesham, that
Sir John Bollamore lived in the old ancestral home of Thorpe Place, and
thither it was that I came to teach his two little sons. Sir John was
a widower--his wife had died three years before--and he had been left
with these two lads aged eight and ten, and one dear little girl of
seven. Miss Witherton, who is now my wife, was governess to this
little girl. I was tutor to the two boys. Could there be a more
obvious prelude to an engagement? She governs me now, and I tutor two
little boys of our own. But, there--I have already revealed what it
was which I gained in Thorpe Place!

It was a very, very old house, incredibly old--pre-Norman, some of
it--and the Bollamores claimed to have lived in that situation since
long before the Conquest. It struck a chill to my heart when first I
came there, those enormously thick grey walls, the rude crumbling
stones, the smell as from a sick animal which exhaled from the rotting
plaster of the aged building. But the modern wing was bright and the
garden was well kept. No house could be dismal which had a pretty girl
inside it and such a show of roses in front.

Apart from a very complete staff of servants there were only four of us
in the household. These were Miss Witherton, who was at that time
four-and-twenty and as pretty--well, as pretty as Mrs. Colmore is
now--myself, Frank Colmore, aged thirty, Mrs. Stevens, the housekeeper,
a dry, silent woman, and Mr. Richards, a tall military-looking man, who
acted as steward to the Bollamore estates. We four always had our
meals together, but Sir John had his usually alone in the library.
Sometimes he joined us at dinner, but on the whole we were just as glad
when he did not.

For he was a very formidable person. Imagine a man six feet three
inches in height, majestically built, with a high-nosed, aristocratic
face, brindled hair, shaggy eyebrows, a small, pointed Mephistophelian
beard, and lines upon his brow and round his eyes as deep as if they
had been carved with a penknife. He had grey eyes, weary,
hopeless-looking eyes, proud and yet pathetic, eyes which claimed your
pity and yet dared you to show it.