orial in death? Still, she was dead, of that there
was no doubt, and oh! the sadness of it all.

He went on to the Abbey, resisting a queer temptation to enter the
church and look at the tomb of the Plantagenet lady and her unknown
knight, who slept there so quietly from year to year, through spring,
summer, autumn and winter, for ever and for ever. The front door was
locked, so he rang the bell. It was answered by a new servant, rather a
forbidding, middle-aged woman with a limp, who informed him that Mr.
Knight was out, and notwithstanding his explanations, declined to admit
him into the house. Doubtless she thought that a young man, wearing a
foreign-looking hat and carrying such a strange long stick, must be a
thief, or worse. The end of it was that she slammed the door in his
face and shot the old-fashioned bolts.

Then Godfrey bethought him of the other door, that which led into the
ancient refectory, which was now used as a schoolroom. This was open,
so he went in and, being tired after his long journey, sat himself down
in the chair at the end of the old oak table, that same chair in which
Isobel had kissed him when he was a little boy. He looked about him
vaguely; the place, of course, was much the same as it had been for the
last five hundred years, but, as he could see from the names on the
copybooks that lay about, the pupils who inhabited it had changed. Of
the whole six not one was the same.

Then, perhaps for the first time, he began to understand how variable
is the world, a mere passing show in which nothing remains the same,
except the houses and the trees. Even these depart, for a cottage with
which he had been familiar from his earliest infancy, as he could see
through the open door, was pulled down to make room for "improvements,"
and the great old elm, where the rooks used to build, had been torn up
in a gale. Only its ugly stump and projecting roots were left.

So he sat musing there, very depressed at heart, till at length Mrs.
Parsons came and discovered him in a half-doze. She, too, was somewhat
changed, for of a sudden age had begun to take a hold of her. Her hair
was white now, and her plump, round face had withered like a spring
apple. Still, she greeted him with the old affection, for which he felt
grateful, seeing that it was the first touch of kindness he had known
since he set foot on English ground.

"Dear me, Master Godfrey!" she said, "hadn't I heard that you were
coming, I could