and hungry upon it, and it was called the
Cloistered House. The last of the three was of wood, and of no great
size--a severely plain but dignified structure, looking like some
council-hall of a past era. Its heavy oak doors and windows with
diamond panes, and its air of order, cleanliness and serenity, gave it
a commanding influence in the picture. It was the key to the history of
the village--a Quaker Meeting-house.

Involuntarily the village had built itself in such a way that it made
a wide avenue from the common at one end to the Meeting-house on the
gorse-grown upland at the other. With a demure resistance to the will
of its makers the village had made itself decorative. The people were
unconscious of any attractiveness in themselves or in their village.
There were, however, a few who felt the beauty stirring around them.
These few, for their knowledge and for the pleasure which it brought,
paid the accustomed price. The records of their lives were the only
notable history of the place since the days when their forefathers
suffered for the faith.

One of these was a girl--for she was still but a child when she died;
and she had lived in the Red Mansion with the tall porch, the wide
garden behind, and the wall of apricots and peaches and clustering
grapes. Her story was not to cease when she was laid away in the stiff
graveyard behind the Meeting-house. It was to go on in the life of her
son, whom to bring into the world she had suffered undeserved, and loved
with a passion more in keeping with the beauty of the vale in which she
lived than with the piety found on the high-backed seats in the Quaker
Meeting-house. The name given her on the register of death was Mercy
Claridge, and a line beneath said that she was the daughter of Luke
Claridge, that her age at passing was nineteen years, and that "her soul
was with the Lord."

Another whose life had given pages to the village history was one of
noble birth, the Earl of Eglington. He had died twenty years after the
time when Luke Claridge, against the then custom of the Quakers, set up
a tombstone to Mercy Claridge's memory behind the Meeting-house. Only
thrice in those twenty years had he slept in a room of the Cloistered
House. One of those occasions was the day on which Luke Claridge put up
the grey stone in the graveyard, three years after his daughter's death.
On the night of that day these two men met face to face in the garden of
the Cloistered House. It wa