Love of his birthplace, and pride of his race, were the strongest points in Kenrick’s character; and Culverhouse was assuredly a home which a man with any sense of the beautiful might be pardoned for loving to enthusiasm. It had been a fortress in those early days when the Danish invader was marking his conquering course along the south-western coast with the blaze of burning villages. It had been an abbey before the Reformation, and much that belonged to its monastic period still remained. Some portions had been converted to secular uses, other parts had been preserved in what might be called a state of substantial ruin. And this mixture of ecclesiastical ruins and Tudor dwelling-house made a most picturesque and romantic whole. The massive outer wall of the cloistered quadrangle still remained, but where the cloisters had been was now the rose garden--a fair expanse of velvet turf, intersected with alleys of roses. The chapel door stood in all its early English purity of line and moulding, but the chapel had given place to a sunny enclosure, bounded by hedges of honeysuckle and sweet-briar, a garden in which old-fashioned flowers grew luxuriantly in prim box-edged beds. The house was one of the handsomest in the county. Much too good for a decayed race, old Sir Kenrick had always said; but young Sir Kenrick held it as in no wise too good for him. He would not have sold it for half a million, had he been free to sell it. The situation was perfect. It stood in a fertile green valley, on the bank of a river which, insignificant elsewhere, widened here to a noble reach of water, and curved lovingly round the velvet slopes of the lawn. A long wooden bridge spanned the river just beyond the old Gothic gateway of the castle, and communicated with the village of Culverhouse, in which a population of a hundred and eighty souls fancied itself a world. Kenrick loved the place--castle, village, river--low-lying water meadows--ancient avenues--fair green field where the foundations of the abbey had been marked out with rows of stones--a stone for each pillar in nave and aisles--chancel and apse--he loved all these things with a love that was almost a passion. His heart thrilled within him when he came back to the familiar scene after a year or more of exile. His nature, not too warm elsewhere, warmed to the old goodies and gaffers of Culverhouse village with an unalterable tenderness. Poor as he was, he had always stray sixpences and shillings in his waistcoat pocket to give these ancient rustics, for beer, or tea, or snuff. He could listen to their stories of rheumatics and other afflictions with infinite patience. Their very dialect was dear to him. If Kenrick had lived in the Middle Ages, and been exposed to visible contact with the powers of darkness, Mephistopheles would have assuredly baited his hook with the Culverhouse estate.