"Which is itself a lie," rejoined the other. "Had this young man's father been alive, you would have found a person after your own heart. He was a man of vast capabilities of belief. His mind was but a looking-glass, always representing what was before it; his religion was in the last sermon he had heard, his politics in the last broadsheet, his opinions those of his companions for the hour, his taste the newest mode that he had seen. He was the quintessence of an ordinary-minded man; but his son is a very different being." Barecolt made no rash promise of abstaining from his favourite amusement, but walked on for about a hundred yards in silence, till suddenly his companion exclaimed, "Do you not see a strange light shining through the wood before us? Hark, there is an alarum-bell!" And hurrying his pace, he issued forth from the wood some three hundred yards farther on, where the cause of the light they had remarked became too visible. Rising up from one of the flanking towers of the old house, in large white volumes, to the very sky, was a tall column of smoke, spreading out towards the top, while from the building itself poured forth the rushing flame like a huge beacon, illuminating all the country round. Each window in that tower and the neighbouring wing emitted the same blaze; and it was very evident--although a number of persons were seen moving about upon the terrace, engaged apparently in the endeavour to extinguish the fire--that it was making its way rapidly towards the rest of the house. The two strangers ran as fast as possible to give assistance. But before I pursue their adventures on that night, I must turn to speak of all that had taken place within the mansion of Bishop's Merton during the evening preceding the disaster which I have described. CHAPTER III. There was in the mansion of Bishop's Merton one of those delightful old chambers which, like a warm and benevolent heart, have a nook for every one. It was a large wide room, with a recess on one side big enough to have formed another room, and a lesser recess at each corner, on the same side, made by two small square turrets, each lighted by its own windows, and containing tables and chairs of its own, so that the studious or the meditative, but not the unsociable, could sit and read, or muse apart, without being actually cut off from the society assembled. The walls were all covered with tapestry, descended through many generations in the same family, and which had covered the walls of a similar chamber in an old castle, partly destroyed luring the civil wars of the Roses, and pulled down at the commencement of the reign of Henry the Eighth.