"I'm not a professor yet," Ned answered, then had some trouble to explain to Bee what it meant. The woollen workers of Liddon were almost all Methodists, while out of the town the gentry and their farmer tenants went to the Church of England, the two classes living entirely separate lives. Ned went to school with Vere Haslem, and a friendship had grown between the boys, partly because it was discouraged by the elders on both sides. To Sir John, Ned was a tradesman's son, brought up in the unspeakable religion of the Quakers, and a most unfit companion for a Haslem, all of whom were "soldiers and gentlemen". While in straight-laced Liddon to become a professor--to profess conversion--was the one aim in life. They took their religion very seriously; classes, preachings, and quarterly meetings were their only dissipations, and many heads were shaken over Ned's friendship with handsome, idle Vere, brought up to think a gentleman's business was war, his amusements heavy drinking and hunting, and his only religion a soldier's code of honour. And Liddon groaned over Sundays at the Towers, spent in cock-fighting, hunting or cards, winding up with the dinner, where often every man, including the parish rector, got drunk. Ned wondered how bright, odd, Bee would get on with her autocratic grandfather; then asked how it happened Vere was not with her. "I detest the creature," said Bee decidedly. "He laughed at my name, and went with some horrid boys to a cock-fight. And as it was time for the stage to start I came on with Mammy Chloe and left him." "Vere generally wriggles out of his scrapes," said Ned, "and I expect he posted up after you, but Sir John will be very angry with him if he knows he didn't obey him and come with you." "I don't tell tales," said Bee contemptuously; then she exclaimed in delighted wonder, for they had left the town, and driven through great gates into a wooded park. It was Haslem Towers, Ned told her, and Bee forgot to keep up her air of American indifference to all things English as they drove up the long winding avenue of glorious oaks and elms. Large-eyed deer moved among the trees, and Bee exclaimed again as she saw a flash of water. They came out by a little lake where white swans sailed, and beyond it, flanked by pleasure gardens, rose a stately pile of white stone--the Towers. "The three towers are two hundred feet high and the newest part of it is three hundred years old," said Ned. "I don't know when a Haslem didn't live here." "Cousin Vere said he would have it all when grandfather dies," said Bee. "It's too good for him. Who will have it when he dies?" "Oh, he'll grow up and have children most likely, but just now the next heir is Captain Percy Haslem. His wife, Mrs. Betty, is staying at the Towers, and he is visiting there, for his regiment is marching from Ireland across England, and is camping to-night in this neighbourhood."