ire.
Little Hugh went with them, his mother strongly desiring it. As for
Rolfe, he escaped to Greystone, to spend a week with Basil Morton
before facing the miseries of the removal from Pinner to Gunnersbury.

Part the Third

CHAPTER 1

The house had stood for a century and a half, and for eighty years had
been inhabited by Mortons. Of its neighbours in the elm-bordered road,
one or two were yet older; all had reached the age of mellowness.
'Sicut umbra praeterit dies'--so ran the motto of the dial set between
porch and eaves; to Harvey Rolfe the kindliest of all greetings,
welcoming him to such tranquillity as he knew not how to find elsewhere.

It was in the town, yet nothing town-like. No sooty smother hung above
the house-tops and smirched the garden leafage; no tramp of crowds, no
clatter of hot-wheel traffic, sounded from the streets hard by. But at
hours familiar, bidding to task or pleasure or repose, the music of the
grey belfries floated overhead; a voice from the old time, an
admonition of mortality in strains sweet to the ear of childhood.
Harvey had but to listen, and the days of long ago came back to him.
Above all, when at evening rang the curfew. Stealing apart to a bowered
corner of the garden, he dreamed himself into the vanished years, when
curfew-time was bed-time, and a hand with gentle touch led him from his
play to that long sweet slumber which is the child's new birth.

Basil Morton was one of three brothers, the youngest. His father, a
corn-factor, assenting readily to his early inclination for the Church,
sent him from Greystone Grammar-School to Cambridge, where Basil passed
creditably through the routine, but in no way distinguished himself.
Having taken his degree, he felt less assured of a clerical vocation,
and thought that the law might perhaps be more suitable to him. Whilst
he thus wavered, his father died, and the young man found that he had
to depend upon himself for anything more than the barest livelihood. He
decided, after all, for business, and became a partner with his eldest
brother, handling corn as his father and his grandfather had done
before him. At eight and twenty he married, and a few years afterwards
the elder Morton's death left him to pursue commerce at his own
discretion. Latterly the business had not been very lucrative, nor was
Basil the man to make it so; but he went steadily on in the old tracks,
satisfied with an income which kept him free fro