"Tell you what it is, gentlemen," said he at last, "you come and stay with me, and see his father. It will comfort the old man--and--and comfort me too; for I get down-hearted about him at times." "Strange attraction there was about that man," says Stangrave, _sotto voce_ to Claude. "He was like a son to him--" "Now, gentlemen. Mr. Mellot, you don't hunt?" "No, thank you," said Claude. "Mr. Stangrave does, I'll warrant." "I have at various times, both in England and in Virginia." "Ah! Do they keep up the real sport there, eh? Well that's the best thing I've heard of them, sir!--My horses are yours!--A friend of that boy, sir, is welcome to lame the whole lot, and I won't grumble. Three days a week, sir. Breakfast at eight, dinner at 5.30--none of your late London hours for me, sir; and after it the best bottle of port, though I say it, short of my friend S----'s, at Reading." "You must accept," whispered Claude, "or he will be angry." So Stangrave accepted; and all the more readily because he wanted to hear from the good banker many things about the lost Tom Thurnall. * * * * * "Here we are," cries Mark. "Now, you must excuse me: see to yourselves. I see to the puppies. Dinner at 5.30, mind! Come along, Goodman, boy!" "Is this Whitbury?" asks Stangrave. It was Whitbury, indeed. Pleasant old town, which slopes down the hill-side to the old church,--just "restored," though by Lords Minchampstead and Vieuxbois, not without Mark Armsworth's help, to its ancient beauty of grey flint and white clunch chequer-work, and quaint wooden spire. Pleasant churchyard round it, where the dead lie looking up to the bright southern sun, among huge black yews, upon their knoll of white chalk above the ancient stream. Pleasant white wooden bridge, with its row of urchins dropping flints upon the noses of elephantine trout, or fishing over the rail with crooked pins, while hapless gudgeon come dangling upward between stream and sky, with a look of sheepish surprise and shame, as of a school-boy caught stealing apples, in their foolish visages. Pleasant new national schools at the bridge end, whither the urchins scamper at the sound of the two o'clock bell. Though it be an ugly pile enough of bright red brick, it is doing its work, as Whitbury folk know well by now. Pleasant, too, though still more ugly, those long red arms of new houses which Whitbury is stretching out along its fine turnpikes,--especially up to the railway station beyond the bridge, and to the smart new hotel, which hopes (but hopes in vain) to outrival the ancient "Angler's Rest." Away thither, and not to the Railway Hotel, they trundle in a fly--leaving Mark Armsworth all but angry because they will not sleep, as well as breakfast, lunch, and dine with him daily,--and settle in the good old inn, with its three white gables overhanging the pavement, and its long lattice window buried deep beneath them,