Project Gutenberg's Two Sides of the Face, by Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch

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Title: Two Sides of the Face
Midwinter Tales

Author: Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch

Release Date: August 1, 2007 [EBook #22198]

Language: English

Character set encoding: ASCII

*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK TWO SIDES OF THE FACE ***

Produced by Lionel Sear

TWO SIDES OF THE FACE.

MIDWINTER TALES.

By

A.T. Quiller-Couch.

CONTENTS

Stephen of Steens.

The Horror on the Stair.

The Mazed Election (1768).

The Hotwells Duel.

Cleeve Court.

The Collaborators.

The Rider in the Dawn.

My Lady's Coach.

STEPHEN OF STEENS.

A Tale of Wild Justice.

I.

Beside a high-road in the extreme West of England stands a house which you
might pass many times without suspecting it of a dark history or, indeed,
any history worth mention. The country itself, which here slopes westward
from the Mining District to Mount's Bay, has little beauty and--unless you
happen to have studied it--little interest. It is bare, and it comes near
to be savage without attaining to the romantic. It includes, to be sure,
one or two spots of singular beauty; but they hide themselves and are not
discoverable from the road, which rewards you only by its extravagant
wealth of wild flowers, its clean sea-breeze, and perhaps a sunset flaming
across the low levels and silhouetting the long shoulder of Godolphin Hill
between you and the Atlantic, five miles distant.

Noting, as you passed, the size of the house, its evident marks of age,
and the meanness of its more modern outbuildings, you would set it down
for the residence of an old yeoman family fallen on evil days. And your
second thought--if it suggested a second--might be that these old yeomen,
not content with a lonely dwelling in a lonely angle of the land, had
churlishly built themselves in and away from sight even of the infrequent
traveller; for a high wall enclosing a courtlage in front screens all but
the upper story with its slated roof, heavy chimneys and narrow upper
windows; and these again are half hidden by the boughs of two ragged yew
trees growing within the enclosure. Behind the house, o