It was, of course, Mr. Jones who started the mixed choir sitting in the chancel behind the remains of the screen. In the last days of the mixed choir, when first Mr. Black came to Riff (after Mr. Jones was made a bishop), Annette sang in it, with a voice that seemed to me, and not to me only, like the voice of an angel. With the exception of Annette and the under-housemaid from the Dower House, it was mainly composed of admirable domestic characters of portly age--the élite of Riff--supplemented by a small gleaning of deeply virtuous, non-fruit-stealing little boys. We are told nowadays that heredity is nothing. But when I remember how those starched and white-collared juvenile singers were nearly all the offspring of the tenors and basses, and of Mrs. Nicholls and Mrs. Cocks who were trebles, I feel the last word still remains to be said about heredity. Annette did not sing in it long--not more than a year, I think. It was soon after she left it that Mr. Black--so I am told--started a surpliced choir. And here am I talking about her leaving the choir when I have not yet told you of her arrival in Lowshire, or anything about Red Riff Farm where her two aunts lived, and where Aunt Maria wrote her famous novel, _The Silver Cross_, of which you have of course often heard, and which if you are of a serious turn of mind you have doubtless read and laid to heart. CHAPTER X "Nothing is so incapacitating as self-love." Red Riff Farm stands near the lane, between the village and the high road, presenting its back to all comers with British sang-froid. To approach it you must go up the wide path between the barn and the dovecote on one side, and on the other the long, low _laiterie_ standing above its wall, just able to look at itself in the pool, where the ducks are breaking up its reflection. When you pass through the narrow iron gateway in the high wall which protects the garden on the north side, the old Jacobean house rises up above you, all built of dim rose-red and dim blue brick, looking benignly out across the meadows over its small enclosed garden which had once been the orchard, in which some of the ancient bent apple trees are still like old pensioners permitted to remain. When Annette first passed through that gateway, the beautiful dim old building with its latticed windows peered at her through a network of apple blossom. But now the apple trees have long since dropped their petals, and you can see the house clearly, with its wavering tiled string courses, and its three rounded gables, and the vine flung half across it. The low, square oak door studded with nails stands wide open, showing a glimpse of a small panelled hall with a carved black staircase coming down into it.