They rode out through the gate and over the bridge of tree-trunks with a vague, black gleam of water on either side. They had hardly crossed when the gate was slammed on them, and they heard the woman laughing, and calling with coarse words to her man. “The pope deliver us, John, but I congratulate my throat on being sound.” “Did you get a glimpse of the man’s face?” “No.” “Nor did I. He seemed shy of showing it.” “The surly scoundrel! As I said before, John, thank Heaven there is a hell.” They pushed on slowly in the dim light, riding over spongy grass-land that sloped upward toward the west. Everywhere the silence of the night still held, save for the fluttering call of an awakened bird. They had gone little more than a furlong when they came to the outstanding thickets of a wood, the trees rising black and strange against the heaviness of the sky. John Gore drew rein suddenly, and swung out of the saddle. “What’s your whim, John?” For he was leading his horse by the bridle toward a clump of beech-trees whose boughs swept close to the ground. “I am going to wait for the dawn.” “There is some wisdom in that,” said Mr. Pepys. “What is more, I want to have a look at the place where we have spent the night. And the folk yonder will not get a glimpse of us in the thick of these trees.” A slow grayness gathered in the east with little crevices of silvering light opening across the sky. The silver turned betimes to gold, with tawny edges to the clouds, and here and there the faintest flush of rose. The grayness rolled back gradually, with a glimmer here and a glimmer there of a hill-top catching the first gleams. In lieu of the ghastly twilight the landscape began to take on color, and to glow, as though touched by fire, with all the wild tints of an autumn dawn. As the day came John Gore saw a great house rise in the valley, with water about it, and grass-land and woods on every side. The walls were smothered with ivy, and through some of the empty windows shone the dawn. Above the roofless rooms a square tower rose, showing a few feet of red brick above its mantling of ivy. There were rotting out-buildings beyond the court-yard, and a green space that looked like a wild garden, while in the meadows about the place grew a number of old thorns. Now there flashed suddenly across John Gore’s mind the picture of Donna Gloria in the Purcells’s house at Westminster. And he knew as he gazed upon it that this place in the valley was their ruined house of Thorn. Mr. Pepys was too short-sighted to distinguish the place distinctly. “Well, John, what do you make of it?” His companion jerked a look at him as though he had forgotten Mr. Pepys’s existence. “Strange chance, Sam! We have spent the night, without knowing it, at the Purcells’s house of Thorn.” “Thorn!”