His road through the fields ran past Hawk’s Hall, of which he observed with a thrill of dismay, that the blinds were drawn as though in it someone lay dead. There was no reason why he should have been dismayed, since he had heard that Isobel had gone away to somewhere in “Ameriky,” as Mrs. Parsons had expressed it in a brief and illspelt letter, and that Sir John was living in town. Yet the sight depressed him still further with its suggestion of death, or of separation, which is almost as bad, for, be it remembered, he was at an age when such impressions come home. After leaving the Hall with its blinded and shuttered windows, his quickest road to the Abbey House ran through the churchyard. Here the first thing that confronted him was a gigantic monument, of which the new marble glittered in the afternoon sun. It was a confused affair, and all he made out of it, without close examination, was a life-sized angel with an early-Victorian countenance, leaning against the broken stump of an oak tree and scattering from a basket, of the kind that is used to collect nuts or windfall apples, on to a sarcophagus beneath a profusion of marble roses, some of which seemed to have been arrested and frozen in mid-air. He glanced at the inscription in gold letters. It was “To the beloved memory of Lady Jane Blake, wife of Sir John Blake, Bart., J.P., and daughter of the Right Hon. The Earl of Lynfield, whose bereaved husband erected this monument—’Her husband ... praiseth her.’” Godfrey looked, and remembering the gentle little woman whose crumbling flesh lay beneath, shivered at the awful and crushing erection above. In life, as he knew, she had been unhappy, but what had she done to deserve such a memorial in death? Still, she was dead, of that there was no doubt, and oh! the sadness of it all. He went on to the Abbey, resisting a queer temptation to enter the church and look at the tomb of the Plantagenet lady and her unknown knight, who slept there so quietly from year to year, through spring, summer, autumn and winter, for ever and for ever. The front door was locked, so he rang the bell. It was answered by a new servant, rather a forbidding, middle-aged woman with a limp, who informed him that Mr. Knight was out, and notwithstanding his explanations, declined to admit him into the house. Doubtless she thought that a young man, wearing a foreign-looking hat and carrying such a strange long stick, must be a thief, or worse. The end of it was that she slammed the door in his face and shot the old-fashioned bolts.