Pardons to the next spire. It's directly under. You can't miss it--not
if you keep to the footpath. My sister's the telegraphist there.
But you're in the three-mile radius, sir. The boy delivers telegrams
directly to this door from Pardons village."

"One has to take a good deal on trust in this country," he murmured.

Sophie looked at the close turf, scarred only with last night's wheels,
at two ruts which wound round a rickyard, and at the circle of still
orchard about the half-timbered house.

"What's the matter with it?" she said. "Telegrams delivered to the Vale
of Avalon, of course," and she beckoned in an earnest-eyed hound of
engaging manners and no engagements, who answered, at times, to the name
of Rambler. He led them, after breakfast, to the rise behind the house
where the stile stood against the skyline, and, "I wonder what we shall
find now," said Sophie, frankly prancing with joy on the grass.

It was a slope of gap-hedged fields possessed to their centres by clumps
of brambles. Gates were not, and the rabbit-mined, cattle-rubbed posts
leaned out and in. A narrow path doubled among the bushes, scores of
white tails twinkled before the racing hound, and a hawk rose, whistling
shrilly.

"No roads, no nothing!" said Sophie, her short skirt hooked by briers.
"I thought all England was a garden. There's your spire, George, across
the valley. How curious!"

They walked toward it through an all abandoned land. Here they found
the ghost of a patch of lucerne that had refused to die: there a harsh
fallow surrendered to yard-high thistles; and here a breadth of rampant
kelk feigning to be lawful crop. In the ungrazed pastures swaths of dead
stuff caught their feet, and the ground beneath glistened with sweat. At
the bottom of the valley a little brook had undermined its footbridge,
and frothed in the wreckage. But there stood great woods on the slopes
beyond--old, tall, and brilliant, like unfaded tapestries against the
walls of a ruined house.

"All this within a hundred miles of London," he said. "Looks as if it
had had nervous prostration, too." The footpath turned the shoulder of
a slope, through a thicket of rank rhododendrons, and crossed what had
once been a carriage drive, which ended in the shadow of two gigantic
holm-oaks.

"A house!" said Sophie, in a whisper. "A Colonial house!"

Behind the blue-green of the twin trees rose a dark-bluish brick
Georgian pile, with a shell-shaped fan-light over