"I would sooner have the devil here. No consideration on earth shall induce me to allow him to put his foot upon this place. No;--not whilst I live." The son said nothing further, and they sat together in silence for some quarter of an hour,--after which the elder of the two rose from his chair, and, coming round the table, put his hand on the son's shoulder, and kissed his son's brow. "Father," said the young man, "you think that I am troubled by things which hardly touch me at all." "By God, they touch me close enough!" said the elder. This had taken place some month or two before the date of Sir Thomas's letter;--but any reference to the matter of which they were both no doubt always thinking was very rare between them. Newton Priory was a place which a father might well wish to leave unimpaired to his son. It lay in the north of Hampshire, where that county is joined to Berkshire; and perhaps in England there is no prettier district, no country in which moorland and woodland and pasture are more daintily thrown together to please the eye, in which there is a sweeter air, or a more thorough seeming of English wealth and English beauty and English comfort. Those who know Eversley and Bramshill and Heckfield and Strathfieldsaye will acknowledge that it is so. But then how few are the Englishmen who travel to see the beauties of their own country! Newton Priory, or Newton Peele as the parish was called, lay somewhat west of these places, but was as charming as any of them. The entire parish belonged to Mr. Newton, as did portions of three or four parishes adjoining. The house itself was neither large nor remarkable for its architecture;--but it was comfortable. The rooms indeed were low, for it had been built in the ungainly days of Queen Anne, with additions in the equally ungainly time of George II., and the passages were long and narrow, and the bedrooms were up and down stairs, as though pains had been taken that no two should be on a level; and the windows were of ugly shape, and the whole mass was uncouth and formless,--partaking neither of the Gothic beauty of the Stuart architecture, nor of the palatial grandeur which has sprung up in our days; and it stood low, giving but little view from the windows. But, nevertheless, there was a family comfort and a warm solidity about the house, which endeared it to those who knew it well. There had been a time in which the present Squire had thought of building for himself an entirely new house, on another site,--on the rising brow of a hill, some quarter of a mile away from his present residence;--but he had remembered that as he could not leave his estate to his son, it behoved him to spend nothing on the property which duty did not demand from him.