“Ah! I don’t mind seeing you afore; and I should have known you if I had, for it is seldom indeed I have a fare to Fawley old Manor House. It must be, I take it, four or five years ago sin’ I wor there with a gent, and he went away while I wor feeding the horse; did me out o’ my back fare. What bisness had he to walk when he came in my fly? Shabby.” “Mr. Darrell lives very retired, then? sees few persons?” “S’pose so. I never seed him as I knows on; see’d two o’ his hosses though,--rare good uns;” and the driver whipped on his own horse, took to whistling, and Lionel asked no more. At length the chaise stopped at a carriage gate, receding from the road, and deeply shadowed by venerable trees,--no lodge. The driver, dismounting, opened the gate. “Is this the place?” The driver nodded assent, remounted, and drove on rapidly through what night by courtesy he called a park. The enclosure was indeed little beyond that of a good-sized paddock; its boundaries were visible on every side: but swelling uplands covered with massy foliage sloped down to its wild, irregular turf soil,--soil poor for pasturage, but pleasant to the eye; with dell and dingle, bosks of fantastic pollards; dotted oaks of vast growth; here and there a weird hollow thorn-tree; patches of fern and gorse. Hoarse and loud cawed the rooks; and deep, deep as from the innermost core of the lovely woodlands came the mellow note of the cuckoo. A few moments more a wind of the road brought the house in sight. At its rear lay a piece of water, scarcely large enough to be styled a lake; too winding in its shaggy banks, its ends too concealed by tree and islet, to be called by the dull name of pond. Such as it was it arrested the eye before the gaze turned towards the house: it had an air of tranquillity so sequestered, so solemn. A lively man of the world would have been seized with spleen at the first glimpse of it; but he who had known some great grief, some anxious care, would have drunk the calm into his weary soul like an anodyne. The house,--small, low, ancient, about the date of Edward VI., before the statelier architecture of Elizabeth. Few houses in England so old, indeed, as Fawley Manor House. A vast weight of roof, with high gables; windows on the upper story projecting far over the lower part; a covered porch with a coat of half-obliterated arms deep panelled over the oak door. Nothing grand, yet all how venerable! But what is this? Close beside the old, quiet, unassuming Manor House rises the skeleton of a superb and costly pile,--a palace uncompleted, and the work evidently suspended,--perhaps long since, perhaps now forever. No busy workmen nor animated scaffolding. The perforated battlements roofed over with visible haste,--here with slate, there with tile; the Elizabethan mullion casements unglazed; some roughly boarded across,--some with staring forlorn apertures, that showed floorless chambers, for winds to whistle through and rats to tenant.