“I know not, love; but there shall be dogs enough for you to play with, I’ll warrant, and a pony for you to ride. Grandfather shall get them for his dearest.” Sir John was fond of Henriette, whom he looked upon as a marvel of precocious brightness; but the boy was his favourite, whom he loved with an old man’s half-melancholy affection for the creature which is to live and act a part in the world when he, the greybeard, shall be dust. CHAPTER XXII. AT THE MANOR MOAT. Solid, grave, and sober, grey with a quarter of a century’s neglect, the Manor House, in the valley below Brill, differed in every detail from the historical Chilton Abbey. It was a moated manor house, the typical house of the typical English squire; an E-shaped house, with a capacious roof that lodged all the household servants, and clustered chimney-stacks that accommodated a great company of swallows. It had been built in the reign of Henry the Seventh, and was coeval with its distinguished neighbour, the house of the Verneys, at Middle Claydon, and it had never served any other purpose than to shelter Englishmen of good repute in the land. Souvenirs of Bosworth field—a pair of huge jack-boots, a two-handed sword, and a battered helmet—hung over the chimney-piece in the low-ceiled hall; but the end of the civil war was but a memory when the Manor House was built. After Bosworth a slumberous peace had fallen on the land, and in the stillness of this secluded valley, sheltered from every bleak wind by surrounding hills and woods, the gardens of the Manor Moat had grown into a settled beauty that made the chief attraction of a country seat which boasted so little of architectural dignity, or of expensive fantasy in moulded brick and carved stone. Plain, sombre, with brick walls and heavy stone mullions to low-browed windows, the Manor House stood in the midst of gardens such as the modern millionaire may long for, but which only the grey old gardener Time can create. There was more than a mile of yew hedge, eight feet high, and three feet broad, walling in flower garden and physic garden, the latter the particular care of the house-mothers of previous generations, the former a paradise of those old flowers which bloom and breathe sweet odours in the pages of Shakespeare, and jewel the verse of Milton. The fritillary here opened its dusky spotted petals to drink the dews of May; and here, against a wall of darkest green, daffodils bloomed unruffled by March winds. Verily a garden of gardens; but when Angela came there in the chill February there were no flowers to welcome her, only the long, straight walks beside those walls of yew, and the dark shining waters of the moat and the fish-pond, reflecting the winter sun; and over all the scene a quiet as of the grave.