r's cart, Godfrey took
the alpenstock that, in a moment of enthusiasm, the guide had given him
as a souvenir of his great adventure, and started for home. It was a
very famous alpenstock, which this guide and his father before him had
used all their lives, one that had been planted in the topmost snows of
every peak in Switzerland. Indeed the names of the most unclimbable of
these, together with the dates of their conquest by its owners,
sometimes followed by crosses to show that on such or such an
expedition life had been lost, were burnt into the tough wood with a
hot iron. As the first of these dates was as far back as 1831, Godfrey
valued this staff highly, and did not like to leave it to the chances
of the carrier's cart.

His road through the fields ran past Hawk's Hall, of which he observed
with a thrill of dismay, that the blinds were drawn as though in it
someone lay dead. There was no reason why he should have been dismayed,
since he had heard that Isobel had gone away to somewhere in "Ameriky,"
as Mrs. Parsons had expressed it in a brief and illspelt letter, and
that Sir John was living in town. Yet the sight depressed him still
further with its suggestion of death, or of separation, which is almost
as bad, for, be it remembered, he was at an age when such impressions
come home.

After leaving the Hall with its blinded and shuttered windows, his
quickest road to the Abbey House ran through the churchyard. Here the
first thing that confronted him was a gigantic monument, of which the
new marble glittered in the afternoon sun. It was a confused affair,
and all he made out of it, without close examination, was a life-sized
angel with an early-Victorian countenance, leaning against the broken
stump of an oak tree and scattering from a basket, of the kind that is
used to collect nuts or windfall apples, on to a sarcophagus beneath a
profusion of marble roses, some of which seemed to have been arrested
and frozen in mid-air. He glanced at the inscription in gold letters.
It was "To the beloved memory of Lady Jane Blake, wife of Sir John
Blake, Bart., J.P., and daughter of the Right Hon. The Earl of
Lynfield, whose bereaved husband erected this monument--'Her husband
... praiseth her.'"

Godfrey looked, and remembering the gentle little woman whose crumbling
flesh lay beneath, shivered at the awful and crushing erection above.
In life, as he knew, she had been unhappy, but what had she done to
deserve such a mem