The view was limited; and yet, for those who knew, it contained much of the history of Beachbourne. Over the top of the wall could be seen the chimney-pots and long blue roofs of what was now the Workhouse, which had, Ned told his father, been a cavalry barracks in the days of Napoleon. Against the wall a fine fig-tree revealed that the new house stood where not long since an old garden, its soil enriched by centuries of the toil of man, had grown the pleasant fruits of the earth. The room was dark but singularly clean. It was distinguished, moreover, by the complete absence of all the ordinary insignia of a lodging-house. There were no pictures on the walls. The furniture, what there was of it, was mahogany, solid and plain, the chairs and sofa horse-hair. If the room lacked the distinction and delicacy of the study, neither was it stamped as was the rest of the house with the conventional hall-mark of the lower middle class. Rather, in its strength and its simplicity it was like the parlour of a yeoman-farmer. The two men talked little at their meal; but all went well until they had resumed their chairs in the sunny front sitting-room that looked over to the solitary stucco house, gloomy amid trees and evergreens, behind a high wall across the road. "The Rectory, I suppose," said the older man, standing in the bow, picking his teeth. "Always the best house in the parish. D'you know the man?" "Just," Edward answered. "What's his sort?" "Oh, the ordinary cleric. A bit of a pagan; a bit of a Pharisee; and a whole-hearted snob. He's a Prebendary who insists on being called a Canon." His father flashed a twinkling eye at him. Just sometimes Hans Caspar wondered whether there might not be more in this poor creature of a son of his than appeared. "How like em!" he mused. "Yet I've an immense admiration for the Church as a commercial concern. Look at the business they've built up. Look at the property they've accumulated. Look at the way the Ecclesiastical Commissioners sweat blood out of the foulest slums in Christendom. They deserve to succeed. Do it all in such style too. House their head-managers in palaces, and pay em £15,000 a year--and perks--and plenty of em. The Hanseatic League was nothing to em." The young man's eyes became quizzical. Then he began to titter in the feeble and deprecatory way of one who half dissents and dares not say so. The door opened quietly. Hans Caspar, standing in the bow, turned round. A small brown-smocked figure, a-stride a dappled grey horse, looked in; and a lovely little singing voice like that of water pouring from a jug, said in a slight stutter with mysterious intimacy, "Daddy!" The little lad stood smiling in the door, the image of his father, of his father's mother, of the Cavalier upon the wall, of those high-bred, rather ineffective faces that look down on visitors from the famous portrait-gallery at Ravensrood, the Somersetshire home of the Beauregards.