That excellent man of business went down to Molesworth next day in order to inspect it generally, with a view to estimating what would have to be spent on it to make it habitable. He had sufficient taste to see the extraordinary dignity of the plain Elizabethan house; and though he felt that Mrs. Palmer would probably have called it a mouldy old ruin, he did not propose, even though he got a percentage on the sale and the costs of renovation, to recommend any scheme of gilding and mirrors. The tapestries were admirable, the Sheraton and Chippendale furniture was excellently suited to the thoroughly English character of the place, and the gardens wanted nothing but gardeners. Bilton's extremely quiet and businesslike mind had its perceptive side, and though he did not care for, yet he appreciated, the leisurely solidity, the leisurely beauty of the place, so characteristic of England, so innate with the genius of the Anglo-Saxon. The red, lichen-toned house had grown there as surely as its stately oaks and lithe beeches had grown there out of the English soil--indigenous, not bought and planted. Cedar-trees with broad fans of leaves, and starred by the ripe cones, made a spacious shade on the lawn, and whispered gently to the stirring of the warm autumn wind, as they bathed themselves in the mellow floods of October sunshine. Below the lawn ran a dimpling trout-stream, and within the precincts of the park stood the small Gothic church, grown gray in its patient, unremitting service, gathering slowly round it the sons of the soil. Attached to one aisle was the chapel of the family, and marble effigies of Scartons knelt side by side, or, reclining on their tombs, raised dumb hands of prayer. One had hung up his armour by him; by the feet of another his hunting dogs lay stretched in sleep. One, but a beardless lad, the second of the race, had been killed in the hunting-field; his wife, so ran the inscription, was delivered of a child the same day, and died within twenty-four hours of her lord. And over all was the air of distinction, of race, of culture that could not be bought, though Lewis S. Palmer, by right of purchase, was entitled to it all. Bilton felt this, but dismissed it as an unprofitable emotion, and made a note on his shirt-cuff to inquire whether the right of presentation to the living belonged to the family.