e afternoon, Mr. and Mrs. Harper and Miss Valery drove to
Kingcombe, to see if in that quaint little town there was a house
suitable for the young couple. They had not said a word to either of
the Miss Harpers concerning this sudden arrangement, agreeing that the
father of the household ought to be shown the respect of receiving the
first information.

"And then," said Nathanael, "I trust mainly to Anne Valery to overcome
his scruples. Anne can do anything she likes with my father. Don't you
remember," he continued, leaning over to the front seat where the two
ladies were, and looking quite cheerful, as though a great load had
been taken off his mind--"don't you remember--I do, though I was such
a little boy--how there was one day a grand family tumult because
Frederick wanted his commission, and my father refused it--how you
walked up and down the garden, first with one and then with the other,
persuading everybody to be friends, while Uncle Brian and I"--

"There, that will do," said Miss Valery. "Never mind old times, but let
us look forward to the future. Here we are at Kingcombe. Agatha, how do
you like the place?"

And Agatha, on this glowing autumn afternoon, eagerly examined her
future home.

It was a rather noteworthy country town; small, clean, with an air of
sober preservation, reminding one of a well-kept, dignified, healthy
old age. It wore its antiquity with a sort of pride, as if its quaint
streets, intersecting one another in cruciform shape, still kept
the impress of mediaeval feet, baron's or priest's, in the days when
Kingcombe had sixteen churches and a castle to boot--as if the Roman
walls which enclosed it lay solemnly conscious that, at night, ghosts
of old Latin warriors glided over the smooth turf of those great earthen
mounds where the town's-children played. Even the very river, which came
up to the town narrow and slow, with perhaps one sailing-barge on it
visible far across the flat country, and looking like a boat taking an
insane pedestrian excursion over the meadows--even the river seemed to
run silently, as if remembering the time when it had floated up Danish
ships with their fierce barbarian freight, and landed them just under
that red sand-cliff, where the lazy cows now stood, and the innocent
blackberry-bushes grew.

It was a curious place Kingcombe, or so Agatha thought.

"How strange it is," Mr. Harper observed. "All these old spots seem to
me like places beheld in a dream.