but I had been over it hitherto with my eyes on nothing else and my
heart in the Lowlands. Now I found myself wondering what the elms had
seen in their day, and what might not be going on in the red houses even
now.

"I hope you know the proper name of our road," said Delavoye as we
turned into it. "It's Mulcaster Park, as you see, and not Mulcaster Park
Road, as it was when we came here in the spring. Our neighbours have
risen in a body against the superfluous monosyllable, and it's been
painted out for ever."

In spite of that precaution Mulcaster Park was still suspiciously like a
road. It was very long and straight, and the desired illusion had not
been promoted by the great names emblazoned on some of the little wooden
gates. Thus there was Longleat, which had just been let for L70 on a
three-year tenancy, and Chatsworth with a C. P. card in the drawing-room
window. Plain No. 7, the Delavoyes' house, was near the far end on the
left-hand side, which had the advantage of a strip of unspoilt woodland
close behind the back gardens; and just through the wood was Witching
Hill House, scene of immemorial excesses, according to this descendant
of the soil.

"But now it's in very different hands," he remarked as we reached our
destination. "Sir Christopher Stainsby is apparently all that my ignoble
kinsman was not. They say he's no end of a saint. In winter we see his
holy fane from our back windows."

It was not visible through the giant hedge of horse-chestnuts now
heavily overhanging the split fence at the bottom of the garden. I had
come out through the dining-room with a fresh sense of interest in these
Delavoyes. Their furniture was at once too massive and too good for the
house. It stood for some old home of very different type. Large
oil-paintings and marble statuettes had not been acquired to receive the
light of day through windows whose upper sashes were filled with cheap
stained glass. A tigerskin with a man-eating head, over which I tripped,
had not always been in the way before a cast-iron mantelpiece. I felt
sorry, for the moment, that Mrs. and Miss Delavoye were not at home; but
I was not so sorry when I beheld the hole in the lawn behind the house.

It had the ugly shape and appearance which had reminded young Delavoye
himself of a churchyard. I was bound to admit its likeness to some
sunken grave, and the white line bisecting it was not the only evidence
that the subsidence was of recent occurrence;