Hakoun must have been a man of taste, though he was a parvenu in spite of his fine coat-of-arms: some said he was nothing better than one of Catherine of Aragon's pages, who became a favourite with England's stout young King when poor Catherine was herself in favour. But he had the wit to consolidate his position in Lowshire by marrying into one of its greatest families, the beautiful Jane de Ludham. Her father it was, Ralph de Ludham, who had made the passage through Sweet Apple Tree marsh because the hated Priors of Noyes hindered people passing through their lands. And his son-in-law, eager to conciliate his Lutheran father-in-law and his country neighbours, gave the stones of the Priory to build the new bridge over the Rieben which stands to this day. From the earliest times, almost from the Conquest, there had been trouble about the bridge. The Priors of Noyes were bound to keep it in good repair by reason of the lands they held on both sides of it. But the Priors had never troubled themselves to carry out their duty, and there was a grim justice in the fact that the very fabric of their Priory fulfilled the obligation which they themselves had ignored when the last of them was in his tomb, and a young Frenchman had taken possession of their lands. The young Frenchman made good his hold on Noyes, and his successors prospered, marrying steadily into the Lowshire families, excepting a certain unlucky Richard who must needs wed a French maid-of-honour of Charles the Second's Court, and, as some averred, the daughter of that witty monarch. There is a charming portrait of Henriette of many curls in the gallery which certainly has a look of the Stuarts, hanging opposite her ill-fated Richard, who soon after the marriage got himself blown up with Lord Sandwich in the _Royal James_. Mrs. Stoddart and Annette were sitting in the walled herb garden which Henriette in her widowhood had made, who had put with pardonable vanity her initials twined in gilded iron in the centre of the iron gate which led down to it from the terrace above. The little enclosed garden lay bathed in a misty sunshine. Beyond it, the wide lawns were still all silvered with dew in the shadows of the forest trees, which seemed to be advanced posts of the great forest gathered like an army on the other side of the river. The ground fell away before their eyes, in pleasaunce and water meadows, to where in the distance you could just discern the remains of the Priory near the bridge which had cost it so dear. Even that "new" bridge was now old, and was showing ominous signs of collapse, and Annette's eyes followed the movements of tiny workmen crawling over it. The distant chink of trowel and hammer reached them through the haze of the windless summer morning. It was evident that the two women had had a long conversation, and that Mrs. Stoddart was slowly turning over something point by point in her mind.