After this there came a silence. Certainly Mrs. Wornock was not gifted as a conversationalist. She sat looking straight before her at the long perspective of lawn and cypress, broad gravel walk, and narrow grass plots, all verging to a point at which the old house rose square and grey, crowned with cupola and bell. The peacocks strutted slowly along the narrow lawn. The waters of a fountain flashed in the warm sunlight. It was a garden that recalled Tivoli, or that old grave garden of the Vatican, with its long level walks and prim flower-beds, in which the Holy Father takes his restricted airing. In the Vatican pleasure grounds there are peacocks and clipped hedges, and smooth greensward, and formal cypress avenues, and quaint arbours; but the hum of Rome, the echoes of the Papal Barrack, the rush of the Tiber are near; and not even in that antique garden can there be this summer silence, profound as in the enchanted isle where it seemeth always afternoon. "Tell me more about yourself, your childhood, your youth," Mrs. Wornock asked suddenly, with an air of agitated impatience which took Allan by surprise. Mrs. Mornington had prepared him for a certain eccentricity in the lonely lady of Discombe; but the strangeness of her manner was even more than he had expected. "There is very little to tell about my own life," he said. "I have lived at home for the most part, except when I was at Eton and Cambridge. My father helped me in all my studies. I never had any other tutor except at the University. My home life was of the quietest. Fendyke is twenty miles from Cambridge, but it seems at the end of the world. The single line of rail that leads to it comes to a full stop. The terminus stands in the midst of a Dutch landscape--level fields divided by shallow dykes, a river so straight that it might as well be a canal, water-mills, pollarded willows, broad clean roads, and fine old Norman churches large enough for a city, no Sunday trains, and not many on lawful days. A neat little town, with decent shops, and comfortable inns, and a market which only awakens from a Pompeian slumber for an hour or two on Fridays. A land of rest and plenty, picturesque cottages and trim cottage gardens, an air of prosperity which I believe is real. So much for our town and surroundings. For the family mansion picture to yourself a long low house, built partly of brick and partly of wood, with chimney-stacks that contain brick enough for the building of respectable houses, and which have defied the gales sweeping down from the Ural mountains--there is nothing, mark you, between Fendyke and the Urals--ever since Queen Elizabeth was young enough to pace a pavan." "You must be fond of an old house like that." "Yes, I am very fond of Fendyke. I even love the surrounding country, though I can but wish Nature had not ironed the landscape with her mammoth iron. She might have left us a few creases, a wrinkled meadow here and there."