And then at the end of quite half-an-hour's struggling, borne, I must say, by Miss Raven, with the truly sporting spirit which was a part of her general character, a sudden exclamation from her, as she pushed her way through a clump of wilding a little in advance of me, caused me to look ahead. "There's some building just in front of us!" she said. "See--grey stones--a ruin!" I looked in the direction she indicated, and through the interstices of the thickly-leaved branches, just then prodigal of their first spring foliage, saw, as she said, a grey wall, venerable and time-stained, rising in front. I could see the topmost stones, a sort of broken parapet, ivy clustering about it, and beneath the green of the ivy, a fragment of some ornamentation and the cavernous gloom of a window place from which glass and tracery had long since gone. "That's something to make for, anyway," I said. "Some old tower or other. Yet I don't remember anything of the sort, marked on the maps." We pushed forward, and came out on a little clearing. Immediately in front of us stood the masonry of which we had caught glimpses; a low, squat, square tower, some forty feet in height, ruinous as to the most part, but having the side facing us nearly perfect and still boasting a fine old doorway which I set down as of Norman architecture. North of this lay a mass of fallen masonry, a long line of grass-grown, weed-encumbered stone, which was evidently the ruin of a wall; here and there in the clearing were similar smaller masses. Rank weed, bramblebush, beds of nettles, encumbered the whole place; it was a scene of ruin and desolation. But a mere glance was sufficient to show me that we had come by accident on a once sacred spot. "Why this," said I, as we paused at the edge of the wood, "this is the ruin of some ancient church, or perhaps of a religious house! Look at the niche there above the arch of the door--there's been an image in that--and at the general run of the stone lying about. Certainly this is an old church! Why have we never heard of it?" "Utterly forgotten, I should think," said Miss Raven. "It must be a long time since there were people about here to come to it." "Probably a village down on the coast--now swept away," I remarked. "But we must look this place out in the local books. Meanwhile let's explore it."