tood all alone there under the great limes of the
Park, far away from parsonage and village--the property, it seemed, of
the big house. When Marcella entered, the doors on the north and south
sides were both standing open, for the vicar and his sister had been
already at work there, and had but gone back to the parsonage for a bit
of necessary business, meaning to return in half an hour.

It was the unpretending church of a hamlet, girt outside by the humble
graves of toiling and forgotten generations, and adorned, or, at any
rate, diversified within by a group of mural monuments, of various
styles and dates, but all of them bearing, in some way or another, the
name of Boyce--conspicuous amongst them a florid cherub-crowned tomb in
the chancel, marking the remains of that Parliamentarian Boyce who
fought side by side with Hampden, his boyish friend, at Chalgrove Field,
lived to be driven out of Westminster by Colonel Pryde, and to spend his
later years at Mellor, in disgrace, first with the Protector, and then
with the Restoration. From these monuments alone a tolerably faithful
idea of the Boyce family could have been gathered. Clearly not a family
of any very great pretensions--a race for the most part of frugal,
upright country gentlemen--to be found, with scarcely an exception, on
the side of political liberty, and of a Whiggish religion; men who had
given their sons to die at Quebec, and Plassy, and Trafalgar, for the
making of England's Empire; who would have voted with Fox, but that the
terrors of Burke, and a dogged sense that the country must be carried
on, drove them into supporting Pitt; who, at home, dispensed alternate
justice and doles, and when their wives died put up inscriptions to them
intended to bear witness at once to the Latinity of a Boyce's
education, and the pious strength of his legitimate affections--a
tedious race perhaps and pig-headed, tyrannical too here and there, but
on the whole honourable English stuff--the stuff which has made, and
still in new forms sustains, the fabric of a great state.

Only once was there a break in the uniform character of the monuments--a
break corresponding to the highest moment of the Boyce fortunes, a
moment when the respectability of the family rose suddenly into
brilliance, and the prose of generations broke into a few years of
poetry. Somewhere in the last century an earlier Richard Boyce went
abroad to make the grand tour. He was a man of parts, the frien