Hawksyard was a real moated grange. The house formed three sides of a quadrangle, with a heavily buttressed garden wall for the fourth side. The water flowed all round the solid base of the building, a wide deep moat, well stocked with pike and eels, carp and roach. The square inner garden was a prim parterre of the seventeenth century, and there was not a flower grew there more modern than Lord Bacon’s day. This was a Turchill fancy. All the novelties of nineteenth-century horticulture might flourish in the spacious garden on the other side of the moat; but this little bit of ground within the gray old walls was a sacred enclosure, dedicated to the spirit of the past. Here the old yew-trees were clipped into peacocks. Here grew rosemary; lavender; periwinkle, white, purple, and blue; germander; flags; sweet marjoram; primroses; anemones; hyacinths; and the rare fritillaria; double white violets, which bloom in April, and again at Bartholomew-tide; gilliflowers; sweetbrier; and the musk-rose. Here the brazen sun-dial, on its crumbling stone pedestal, reminded the passer-by that no man is always wise. Here soft mosses, like tawny velvet, crept over the gray relics of an abbey that had been destroyed soon after the grange was built—the stone coffin of a mitred abbot; the crossed legs of a knightly crusader, with a headless heraldic dog at his feet. Here was the small circular fish-pond into which the last of the abbots was supposed to have pitched headforemost, and incontinently drowned himself, walking alone at midnight in a holy trance. Mrs. Turchill was almost as fond as Edgar was of Hawksyard; but her affection took a commonplace turn. She was not to the manner born. She had come to the grange from a smart nineteenth-century villa, and though she was very proud of the grave old house of which her husband had made her the mistress, her pride was mingled with an idea that Hawksyard was inconvenient, and that its old fashion was a thing to be apologised for and deprecated at every turn. Her chief delight was in keeping her house in order; and her servants were drilled to an almost impossible perfection in every duty appertaining to house-cleaning. Nobody’s brasses, or oak floors, or furniture, or family plate, or pewter dinner-service, ever looked so bright as Mrs. Turchill’s. Nowhere were windows so spotless; nowhere was linen so exquisitely white, or of such satin-like smoothness. Mrs. Turchill lived for these things. When she was in London, or at the sea-side, she would be miserable on rainy days at the idea that Jane or Mary would leave the windows open, and that the brass fenders and fire-irons were all going to ruin.