lly well? You haven't
seen him since you were a little boy, have you?'

'No; but we write once a year. And from what I have heard my father say,
I am sure the old man would never leave the house out of the family. Do
you think you would like it?'

'I don't know. Isn't it very lonely?'

'I suppose it is. I forget whether there are any other houses in sight,
but I don't think there are any at all near. But what a change! No City,
no streets, no people passing to and fro; only the sound of the wind and
the sight of the green leaves and the green hills, and the song of the
voices of the earth.'... He checked himself suddenly, as if he feared
that he was about to tell some secret that must not yet be uttered; and
indeed, as he spoke of the change from the little street in Shepherd's
Bush to that ancient house in the woods of the far west, a change seemed
already to possess himself, and his voice put on the modulation of an
antique chant. Mary looked at him steadily and touched his arm, and he
drew a long breath before he spoke again.

'It is the old blood calling to the old land,' he said. 'I was
forgetting that I am a clerk in the City.'

It was, doubtless, the old blood that had suddenly stirred in him; the
resurrection of the old spirit that for many centuries had been
faithful to secrets that are now disregarded by most of us, that now day
by day was quickened more and more in his heart, and grew so strong that
it was hard to conceal. He was indeed almost in the position of the man
in the tale, who, by a sudden electric shock, lost the vision of the
things about him in the London streets, and gazed instead upon the sea
and shore of an island in the Antipodes; for Darnell only clung with an
effort to the interests and the atmosphere which, till lately, had
seemed all the world to him; and the grey house and the wood and the
river, symbols of the other sphere, intruded as it were into the
landscape of the London suburb.

But he went on, with more restraint, telling his stories of far-off
ancestors, how one of them, the most remote of all, was called a saint,
and was supposed to possess certain mysterious secrets often alluded to
in the papers as the 'Hidden Songs of Iolo Sant.' And then with an
abrupt transition he recalled memories of his father and of the strange,
shiftless life in dingy lodgings in the backwaters of London, of the dim
stucco streets that were his first recollections, of forgotten squares
in North