“Cissy!” cried Travers, angrily reining in his horse and stopping short in a political discussion which he had forced upon Kenelm, “Cissy! How comes this? We have taken the wrong turn! No matter, I see there,” pointing to the right, “the chimney-pots of old Mondell’s homestead. He has not yet promised his vote to George Belvoir. I’ll go and have a talk with him. Turn back, you and Mr. Chillingly,--meet me at Terner’s Green, and wait for me there till I come. I need not excuse myself to you, Chillingly. A vote is a vote.” So saying, the Squire, whose ordinary riding-horse was an old hunter, halted, turned, and, no gate being visible, put the horse over a stiff fence and vanished in the direction of old Mondell’s chimney-pots. Kenelm, scarcely hearing his host’s instructions to Cecilia and excuses to himself, remained still and gazing on the old tower thus abruptly obtruded on his view. Though no learned antiquarian like his father, Kenelm had a strange fascinating interest in all relics of the past; and old gray towers, where they are not church towers, are very rarely to be seen in England. All around the old gray tower spoke with an unutterable mournfulness of a past in ruins: you could see remains of some large Gothic building once attached to it, rising here and there in fragments of deeply buttressed walls; you could see in a dry ditch, between high ridges, where there had been a fortified moat: nay, you could even see where once had been the bailey hill from which a baron of old had dispensed justice. Seldom indeed does the most acute of antiquarians discover that remnant of Norman times on lands still held by the oldest of Anglo-Norman families. Then, the wild nature of the demesne around; those ranges of sward, with those old giant oak-trunks, hollowed within and pollarded at top,--all spoke, in unison with the gray tower, of a past as remote from the reign of Victoria as the Pyramids are from the sway of the Viceroy of Egypt. “Let us turn back,” said Miss Travers; “my father would not like me to stay here.” “Pardon me a moment. I wish my father were here; he would stay till sunset. But what is the history of that old tower? a history it must have.” “Every home has a history, even a peasant’s hut,” said Cecilia. “But do pardon me if I ask you to comply with my father’s request. I at least must turn back.” Thus commanded, Kenelm reluctantly withdrew his gaze from the ruin and regained Cecilia, who was already some paces in return down the lane. “I am far from a very inquisitive man by temperament,” said Kenelm, “so far as the affairs of the living are concerned. But I should not care to open a book if I had no interest in the past. Pray indulge my curiosity to learn something about that old tower. It could not look more melancholy and solitary if I had built it myself.”