s ain't the loveliest. A reel
'ouse, with reel beds an' sorsepans!"

Her jaw dropped.

"An' I flung that blessed book away just as it was tellin' about
breakfast dishes!"

CHAPTER XXIV.

GLASSON IN CHASE.

"_Prospero: Hey, Mountain, hey!
Ariel: Silver, there it goes, Silver!_"--THE TEMPEST.

Like most men of fifty or thereabouts, and like every man who finds
himself at that age a bachelor rector of a remote country parish,
Parson Chichester had collected a number of small habits or
superstitions--call them which you will: they are the moss a sensible
stone gathers when it has ceased rolling. He smoked a pipe in the house
or when he walked abroad, but a Manila cheroot (he belonged to the age
of cheroots) when he rode or drove; and he never rode on a Sunday, but
either walked or used a dog-cart. Also by habit--or again, if you
please, superstition--he preached one sermon, not necessarily a new one,
every week.

To-day he had broken through this last custom, but observed the others.
After an abbreviated Morning Service he lit a cheroot, climbed into his
dog-cart, and drove off towards Meriton at a brisk pace, being due to
perform his errand there and report himself at Meriton by three in the
afternoon. For luncheon he carried a box of sandwiches and a flask of
whisky and water. His horse--a tall, free-stepping bay, by name
Archdeacon--was, properly speaking, a hunter, and the Parson, in driving
as in riding him, just rattled him along, letting him feel the rein but
seldom, or never using it to interfere with his pace.

The entrance gates at Meriton are ancient and extremely handsome,
wrought of the old iron of East Sussex, and fashioned, somewhere in the
mid-eighteenth century, after an elaborate Florentine pattern--tradition
says, by smiths imported from Italy. The pillars are of weather-stained
marble, and four in number, the two major ones surrounded by antlered
stags, the two minor by cressets of carved flame, symbolising the human
soul, and the whole illustrating the singular motto of the Chandons,
"_As the hart desireth._" On either side of the gates is a lodge in the
Ionic style, with a pillared portico, and the lodges are shadowed by two
immense cedars, the marvel of the country-side.

But to-day the lodges stood empty, with closed doors and drawn blinds--
the doors weather-stained, the blinds dingy with dust. Weeds overgrew
the bases of the pillars, and grass had encroached upon all but