"No, thank you; I am content." He took off his hat in mocking homage to the home of the Rothwells, and turned to go. "And have you any more decayed residences to show me, Miss Strange?" "Only some graves," she answered, simply. "Oh, they are all graves!" said Harding with his short laugh, swinging his umbrella as they resumed their walk. Already Barbara had become accustomed to that little jarring laugh, which had no merriment in it. She did not like it, but she was curiously impressed by it. When the young man was grave and stiff and shy she was sorry for him; she remembered that he was only Mr. Reynold Harding, their guest for a week. But when he was sufficiently at his ease to laugh she felt as if all the Rothwells were mocking, and she were the interloper and inferior. "I suppose it does seem like that to you--as if they were all graves," she said timidly, as she led the way across the road to a gate in the tangled hedge; the field into which it led sloped steeply down. "That is what people call the best view of Mitchelhurst," she explained. To the left was Mitchelhurst Place, gaunt and white among its warped and weather-beaten trees. Before them lay the dotted line of Mitchelhurst Street, and they looked down into the square cabbage-plots. The sails of the windmill swung heavily round, and the smoke went up from the blacksmith's forge. To the right was the church, with its thickset tower, and the sun shining feebly on the wet surface of its leaden roof. Barbara pointed out a small oblong patch of grass and evergreens as the vicarage garden, while a bare building, of the rawest red brick, was the Mitchelhurst workhouse. The view was remarkably comprehensive. Mitchelhurst lay spread below them in small and melancholy completeness. "Yes, it's all there, right enough," said Reynold, leaning on the gate. "An excellent view. All there, from the Place where my people spent their money, to the workhouse, where----By Jove!" his voice dropped suddenly, "I'm not Rothwell enough to have a right to be taken into the Mitchelhurst workhouse! They'd send me on somewhere, I suppose. I wonder which they would call my parish!" "Are you sorry?" Barbara asked, after a pause. "Sorry not to be in the workhouse?" indicating it with a slight movement of his finger. "No, not particularly." "I didn't mean that," said the girl, a little shortly. "I meant, of course, are you sorry you are not a Rothwell?" "I don't know." He spoke slowly, half reluctantly, and still leaned on the gate, with his eyes wandering from point to point of the little landscape, which was softened and saddened by the pale light and paler haze of October. It was Barbara who finally broke the silence. "You didn't like the house this morning, and you didn't like the old hall just now, so I thought most likely you wouldn't care for this."