So passed the remaining days of their stay at Brakelond. Then the three removed to Ivescar, and, with the setting, the colour of the whole drama changed. Human life and death was the keynote of Brakelond; its Castle seemed built and mortared with the tears and tragedies of innumerable generations. Every stone was permeated with the history of ten thousand men and women, who, through eight centuries, had brought to bear upon the building the fire and fury of their individual existences. Outside the walls rolled down the skirt of forest, and below lay the sea; but forest and sea were subordinate in the scheme, decorations and embroideries on the main theme. And the main theme was the incessant human note that resounded in every detail of the old tragic Castle. At Ivescar, on the other hand, man was a new-comer, an accident, a thing irrelevant and even incongruous. High up in its narrow mountain-valley lay the house, amid a plantation of stunted, wind-swept pines. It had the air of having been put there, not of having grown. Brakelond had sprung and waxed from the rock it stood on; it was the last crowning development of the land it dominated. Ivescar was an artificial product, unrelated to the soil, the work of alien brains and alien natures. Twenty centuries might pass over it without bringing it into any closer kindred with its surroundings, without softening the raw, crude note of novelty that it would always strike among the solemn eternal hills. It was a large sandstone building, of the most solid Early-Victorian Tudor design, as Isabel’s instinct had foretold. In the middle rose a big square tower, finished off with a stone lacework of circles and spikes. It had a flagstaff, a cupola with a bell in it, and a huge conservatory that had been put there because it was expensive to set up, and now remained there because it would be expensive to remove. On three sides of it stretched a bare lawn, and on the fourth its less honourable quarters were shrouded in sparse plantation, created at great outlay, with much difficulty and no success. The one level space of ground in the glen had been picked out, all its irregularities trimmed away, and the pretence of a park elaborately maintained under the mountain-slopes that rose stark and stern on either side. A little river struggled down from the end of the valley, and found its way among stones and mosses through the young woodland. Where it passed within sight of the house, at the other side of the flat lawn, it had been civilized and sedulously constrained into decorum. Its banks had been widened, made uniform and flat. Dammed at one end, it had been made to stretch out into a square shallow lake, whose grey and steely surface reflected the staring yellow of the house against the grey hills and sky behind, with a dreariness impossible to conceive. Coarse, rank grasses grew along its margin, and its shoals, malodorous and muddy, were abristle with melancholy rushes.