‘It belongs to me,’ responded Jerome. ‘Good-day, and thank you.’ With which he walked on, leaving his interlocutor to stare after him, scratch his head, and remark to himself: ‘Well, I’m dom’d! It mun be John Wellfield’s lad. Eh, but I mun go and tell ’em about this ’ere down at th’ Black Bull.’ Jerome, meantime followed the directions he had received, and soon found the cavernous-looking remains of Monk’s Gate, ‘straddling,’ as his guide had said, ‘o’ across t’ road,’ a huge, grim, ivy-covered portal, showing, by its distance from the rest of what were now the Abbey grounds, what a great and glorious possession this said Abbey had once been. A little way on the other side of the archway to the left, was a gate, leading into a garden; there was a gravel drive going up to a low quaint-looking grey stone house. This, then, must be Monk’s Gate. It was a wilderness of a garden, with a large, irregularly shaped lawn, of a velvety softness and greenness, which neglect had not yet ruined. In the very centre of this lawn rose a high, thin old pear-tree. Scattered about were other kinds of fruit-trees. Broad borders of all sweet and old-fashioned flowers were filled with a rank luxuriance of plants, some blooming, some not yet in bloom; others almost choked to death by their more flourishing neighbours. On the left of the broad walk was a high wall, and behind the wall fine beech-trees which cast the shade of their ample boughs far into the garden of Monk’s Gate. The house itself stood back; it looked a small house for such a large, luxuriant garden. It was very low, Jerome saw, with odd-looking windows half-hidden by roses and clematis, while all over the left side of the house, a flourishing ivy revelled healthily. He approached nearer. Just before the house was a great bush of the Gloire de Dijon rose—the fragrance of its second crop that year filled the air for yards around. Drawing forth the key which Mr. Netley had given him, he applied it to the door, and its rattle in the lock was the first sound to break the almost oppressive hush and stillness, and deadly calm of everything around and about. The lock turned somewhat rustily and unwillingly. It required him to exert the strength of both his hands to induce it entirely to yield. Then he pushed the door open, stepped in, and stood beneath all that he could now call his own roof-tree. A narrow passage—a door to the left, which he passed; the passage was only a few feet long; one stepped out of it, without door or other intervening ceremony, into a large, low, raftered room, with a high old wooden chimney-piece, deep oaken cupboards sunk in the walls, a long, very low window, with a deep, roomy seat in it—a heavy oaken table in the centre of the room, and, at one side, an ancient, shabby, comfortable-looking settee. In a remote corner there was a pile of old furniture, which in its dirt and shabbiness looked remarkably like lumber.