"To the estate. I'll show you the back parts if ye like. You're from
America, ain't ye? I've had a son there once myself." They followed him
down the main stairway. He paused at the turn and swept one hand toward
the wall. "Plenty room, here for your coffin to come down. Seven foot
and three men at each end wouldn't brish the paint. If I die in my bed
they'll 'ave to up-end me like a milk-can. 'Tis all luck, dye see?"

He led them on and on, through a maze of back kitchens, dairies,
larders, and sculleries, that melted along covered ways into a
farm-house, visibly older than the main building, which again rambled
out among barns, byres, pig-pens, stalls and stables to the dead fields
behind.

"Somehow," said Sophie, sitting exhausted on an ancient
well-curb--"somehow one wouldn't insult these lovely old things by
filling them with hay."

George looked at long stone walls upholding reaches of silvery-oak
weather-boarding; buttresses of mixed flint and bricks; outside stairs,
stone upon arched stone; curves of thatch where grass sprouted; roundels
of house-leeked tiles, and a huge paved yard populated by two cows and
the repentant Rambler. He had not thought of himself or of the telegraph
office for two and a half hours.

"But why," said Sophie, as they went back through the crater of stricken
fields,--"why is one expected to know everything in England? Why do
they never tell?"

"You mean about the Elphicks and the Moones?" he answered.

"Yes--and the lawyers and the estate. Who are they? I wonder whether
those painted floors in the green room were real oak. Don't you like us
exploring things together--better than Pompeii?"

George turned once more to look at the view. "Eight hundred acres go
with the house--the old man told me. Five farms altogether. Rocketts is
one of 'em."

"I like Mrs. Cloke. But what is the old house called?"

George laughed. "That's one of the things you're expected to know. He
never told me."

The Clokes were more communicative. That evening and thereafter for
a week they gave the Chapins the official history, as one gives it to
lodgers, of Friars Pardon the house and its five farms. But Sophie
asked so many questions, and George was so humanly interested, that,
as confidence in the strangers grew, they launched, with observed and
acquired detail, into the lives and deaths and doings of the Elphicks
and the Moones and their collaterals, the Haylings and the Torrells. It
was a tale to