Between Monksland and the town of Northwold lay some four miles of cliff, most of which had been portioned off in building lots, for Northwold was what is called a “rising watering-place.” About half-way between the Abbey and this town stood Mr. Porson’s mansion. In fact, it was nothing but a dwelling like those about it, presenting the familiar seaside gabled roofs of red tiles, and stucco walls decorated with sham woodwork, with the difference that the house was exceedingly well built and about four times as large as the average villa. “Great heavens! what a place!” said the Colonel to himself as he halted at the private gateway which opened on to the cliff and surveyed it affronting sea and sky in all its naked horror. “Show me the house and I will show you the man,” he went on to himself; “but, after all, one mustn’t judge him too hardly. Poor Porson, he did not arrange his own up-bringing or his ancestors. Hello! there he is. “John, John, John!” he shouted at a stout little person clad in a black alpaca coat, a straw hat, and a pair of spectacles, who was engaged in sad contemplation of a bed of dying evergreens. At the sound of that well-known voice the little man jumped as though he had trodden on a pin, and turned round slowly, muttering to himself, “Gracious! It’s him!” an ungrammatical sentence which indicated sufficiently how wide a niche in the temple of his mind was filled with the image of his brother-in-law, Colonel Monk. John Porson was a man of about six or eight and fifty, round-faced, bald, with large blue eyes not unlike those of a china doll, and clean-shaven except for a pair of sandy-coloured mutton-chop whiskers. In expression he was gentle, even timid, and in figure short and stout. At this very moment behind a hundred counters stand a hundred replicas of that good-hearted man and worthy citizen, John Porson. Can he be described better or more briefly? “How are you, Colonel?” he said, hurrying forward. He had never yet dared to call his brother-in-law “Monk,” and much less by his Christian name, so he compromised on “Colonel.” “Pretty well, thank you, considering my years and botherations. And how are you, John?” “Not very grand, not very grand,” said the little man; “my heart has been troubling me, and it was so dreadfully hot in London.” “Then why didn’t you come away?” “Really I don’t know. I understood that it had something to do with a party, but I think the fact is that Mary was too lazy to look after the servants while they packed up.” “Perhaps she had some attraction there,” suggested the Colonel, with an anxiety which might have been obvious to a more skilled observer. “Attraction! What do you mean?” asked Porson. “Mean, you old goose? Why, what should I mean? A young man, of course.”