ut of
the window, and the happy pair fell on the doorstep, corpses."

"Is it true, do you think?"

The porter did not know. At any rate there was a tablet in the church
to Maria Sefton and George Ballard--"and something about in their death
them not being divided."

I took the stile, I skirted the wood, I "catered" across the meadow--and
so I came out on a chalky ridge held in a net of pine roots, where dog
violets grew. Below stretched the green park, dotted with trees. The
lodge, stuccoed but solid, lay below me. Smoke came from its chimneys.
Lower still lay the Manor House--red brick with grey lichened mullions,
a house in a thousand, Elizabethan--and from its twisted beautiful
chimneys no smoke arose. I hurried across the short turf towards the
Manor House.

I had no difficulty in getting into the great garden. The bricks of the
wall were everywhere displaced or crumbling. The ivy had forced the
coping stones away; each red buttress offered a dozen spots for
foothold. I climbed the wall and found myself in a garden--oh! but such
a garden. There are not half a dozen such in England--ancient box
hedges, rosaries, fountains, yew tree avenues, bowers of clematis (now
feathery in its seeding time), great trees, grey-grown marble
balustrades and steps, terraces, green lawns, one green lawn, in
especial, girt round with a sweet briar hedge, and in the middle of
this lawn a sundial. All this was mine, or, to be more exact, might be
mine, should my cousin Selwyn prove to be a person of sense. How I
prayed that he might not be a person of taste! That he might be a person
who liked yachts or racehorses or diamonds, or motor-cars, or anything
that money can buy, not a person who liked beautiful Elizabethan houses,
and gardens old beyond belief.

The sundial stood on a mass of masonry, too low and wide to be called a
pillar. I mounted the two brick steps and leaned over to read the date
and the motto:

"Tempus fugit manet amor."

The date was 1617, the initials S. S. surmounted it. The face of the
dial was unusually ornate--a wreath of stiffly drawn roses was traced
outside the circle of the numbers. As I leaned there a sudden movement
on the other side of the pedestal compelled my attention. I leaned over
a little further to see what had rustled--a rat--a rabbit? A flash of
pink struck at my eyes. A lady in a pink dress was sitting on the step
at the other side of the sundial.

I suppose some exclamation escaped