"E. Wornock!" he repeated, studying the signature. "Why no Christian name? And what is the name which that initial represents? Eliza, perhaps--and she sinks it, thinking it common and housemaidish--forgetting how Ben Jonson, by that housemaidish name, does designate the most glorious of queens. Possibly Ellen--a milk-and-waterish name, with less of dignity than Eliza; or Emily, my mother's name--graceful but colourless. I have never thought it good enough for so fine a character as my mother. She should have been Katherine or Margaret, Gertrude or Barbara, names that have a fulness of sound which implies fulness of meaning. I will call at Discombe Manor this afternoon. Delay would be churlish--and I want to see what Geoffrey Wornock's home is like." The afternoon was warm and sunny, and Allan made a leisurely circuit of the chase and park of Discombe on his way to Mrs. Wornock's house. The beauty of the Manor consisted as much in the perfection of detail as in the grandeur of the mansion or the extent of gardens and park. The mansion was not strikingly architectural nor even strikingly picturesque. It was a sober red brick house, with a high, tiled roof, and level rows of windows--those of the upper story were the original lattices of 1664, the date of the house; but on the lower floors mullions and lattices had given place to long French windows, of a uniform unpicturesque flatness, opening on a broad gravel walk, beyond which the smooth shaven grass sloped gently to the edge of a moat, for Mrs. Wornock's house was one of those moated manor-houses of which there are so few left in the south of England. The gardens surrounding that grave-looking Carolian house had attained the ideal of horticultural beauty under many generations of garden-lovers, the ideal of old-fashioned beauty, be it understood; the beauty of clipped hedges and sunk lawns, walls of ilex and of yew, solemn avenues of obelisk-shaped conifers, labyrinths, arches, temples and arcades of roses, tennis-lawns and bowling-greens, broad borders of old-fashioned perennials, clumps and masses of vivid colour, placed with art that seemed accidental wherever vivid colour was wanted to relieve the verdant monotony. If the gardens were perfect, the house, farm, and cottages were even more attractive in their arcadian grace, the grace of a day that is dead. Quaint roofs and massive chimney-stacks, lattices, porches, sun-dials, gardens brimming over with flowers, trim pathways, shining panes, everywhere a spotless cleanliness, a wealth of foliage, an air of prosperous fatness, bee-hives, poultry, cattle, all the signs and tokens of dependents for whom much is done, and whose dwellings flourish at somebody else's expense.