It was nearly ten o’clock when he rode slowly along the avenue that led into Dorchester. The moon was shining between the overarching boughs of the sycamores. The road with that high overarching roof had a solemn look in the moonlit stillness. The Roman amphitheatre yonder, with its grassy banks rising tier above tier, shone white in the moonbeams; the old town seemed half asleep. The house in Cornhill had a very Philistine look as compared with that fine old mansion of Cheriton which was present in his mind in very vivid colours to-night, those two wandering about the old Italian garden, hand-in-hand, wedded lovers, with the lamp-lit rooms open to the soft summer night, and the long terrace and stone balustrade and moss-grown statues of nymph and goddess silvered by the moonbeams. The Cornhill house was a good old house notwithstanding, a panelled house of the Georgian era, with a wide entrance-hall, and a well-staircase with carved oak balusters and a baluster rail a foot broad. The furniture had been very little changed since the days of Theodore’s great-grandfather, for the late Mrs. Dalbrook had cherished no yearnings for modern art in the furniture line. Her gentle spirit had looked up to her husband as a leader of men, and had reverenced chairs and tables, bureaus and wardrobes that had belonged to his grandfather, as if they were made sacred by that association. And thus the good old house in the good old town had a savour of bygone generations, an old family air which the parvenu would buy for much gold if he could. True that the dining-room chairs were over-ponderous, and the dining-room pictures belonged to the obscure school of religious art in which you can only catch your saint or your martyr at one particular angle; yet the chairs were of a fine antique form, and bore the crest of the Dalbrooks on their shabby leather backs, and the pictures had a respectable brownness which might mean Holbein or Rembrandt. The drawing-room was large and bright, with four narrow, deeply recessed windows commanding the broad street and the Antelope Hotel over the way, and deep window seats crammed with flowers. Here the oak panelling had been painted pale pink, and the mouldings picked out in a deeper tint by successive generations of Vandals, but the effect was cheerful, and the pink walls made a good background for the Chippendale secretaires and cabinets filled with willow-pattern Worcester or Crown Derby. The window-curtains were dark brown cloth, with a border of Berlin wool lilies and roses, a border which would have set the teeth of an æsthete on edge, but which blended with the general brightness of the room. Old Mrs. Matthew Dalbrook, the grandmother, and her three spinster daughters had toiled over these cross-stitch borders, and Theodore’s mother would have deemed it sacrilege to have put aside this labour of a vanished life.