The morning was lovely, more like April than March. The bay trotted along complacently, neither lazy nor feverishly active, but with an air of knowing what he had to do for his day's wage, and meaning honestly to do it. Allan was glad that his road took him past Beechhurst. Possession had still all the charm of novelty. His heart thrilled with pride as he slackened his pace to gaze fondly at the pretty white house, low and long, with a verandah running all along the southern front, admirably placed upon a gentle elevation, against the swelling shoulder of a broad down, facing south-west, and looking over garden and shrubbery, and across a stretch of common, that lay between Beechhurst and the high-road, and gave a dignified aloofness to the situation; seclusion without dulness, a house and grounds remote, but not buried or hidden. "Nothing manorial about it," mused Allan; "but it certainly looks a gentleman's place." He would naturally have preferred something less essentially modern. He would have liked Tudor chimneys, panelled walls, and a family ghost. He would have liked to know that his race had taken deep root in the soil, had been lords of the manor centuries and centuries ago, when Wamba was keeping pigs in the woods, and when the jester's bells mixed with the merry music of hawk and hound. Admiral Darnleigh, so far as Wiltshire was concerned, had been a new man. He had made his money in China, speculating in tea-gardens, and other property, while pursuing his naval career with considerable distinction. He had retired from active service soon after the Chinese war, a C.B. and a rich man, had bought Beechhurst a bargain--during a period of depression--and had settled down in yonder pretty white house, with a small but admirable establishment, each member thereof a pearl of price among servants, and had there spent the tranquil even-tide of an honourable and consistently selfish life. He had never married. As a single man, he had always felt himself rich; as a married man he might often have felt himself poor. He had heard Allan at five and twenty declare that he had done with the romance of life, and that he, too, meant to be a bachelor; and it may be that this boyish assertion, carelessly made over a bottle of Lafitte, did in some measure influence the Admiral's choice of an heir. Allan's father and mother were of a more liberal mind. "You are in a better position than your father was at your age," said Lady Emily Carew, on her son's accession to fortune. "I hope you will marry well--and soon." There was no thought of woman's love, or of married bliss, in Allan Carew's mind, as he rode through the lanes and over a common, and across a broad stretch of open down to the Pig and Whistle. He was full, not of his inner self, but of the outer world around and about him, pleased with the pleasant country in which his lot was cast, wondering what his new neighbours were like, and how they would receive him.