“When war broke out there were two beautiful daughters living, most of their time, down there at Mallorie Abbey, and a son who went over with the expeditionary force as soon as war was declared. This young man was killed in action, under the most heroic circumstances. He was, apparently, the type of young soldier who might have been one of Arthur’s men, and I believe the clerical incumbent there used to quote the lines of the Puritan Milton: ‘Arthur stirring wars under the earth that hides him,’ or ‘Millions of spiritual creatures walk the earth unseen,’ as having a kind of ironic application to the whole Mallorie domain. When I came back from France I was pretty well used up, and Carteret Lyon asked me down to his place, which stands within four or five miles of Mallorie, in the south. They are, of course, in mourning and fearfully sad, but I met the eldest daughter at tea one afternoon, and, being the most natural people on earth, and as I could tell her some things she wished to hear about France, we became almost friends at once. After that they made me welcome at Mallorie whenever I dropped in at tea-time, and one day Lady Maurya took me over the abbey, telling me as we went through the dim old place with its stained and mullioned windows a lot of its curious, almost supernatural, history. Suddenly she broke off from the narrative, on which it had seemed to me that her mind had been only lightly fixed, and, sinking down on a window-seat in the low, long hall we had been passing through, she looked up at me and said: ‘Ah, this is nothing to something that has really happened here within the year.’ “I asked her if she could tell me, and she answered that she wished to, but that it was all so very extraordinary that she feared I would be unable to believe it, and she felt that she could not hear it doubted. “I said to her that I was the most believing man since the Dark Ages, and so she told me.