lady in the 'vi'let velvet,' Mary Elia Adelgisa de Vaignecourt, had often caught his eye and charmed his fancy when the setting sun had illumined its rich colouring and had given life to the face, half-petulant, half-sweet, which pouted forth from the old canvas like a rose with light on its petals. Now all these pleasant rambles were finished. The mistress of Abbot's Manor would certainly object to a wandering parson in her house and grounds. Probably she was a very imperious, disagreeable young woman,-full of the light scorn, lack of sentiment and cheap atheism common to the 'smart' lady of a decadent period, and if it were true that she had been for so many years in the charge of an American aunt with a 'hundred millions,' the chances were ten to one that she would be an exceedingly unpleasant neighbour.

He gave a short impatient sigh.

"Ah, well! I only hope she will put a stop to the felling of the fine old trees in her domain," he said half aloud,— "If no one else in the village has the pluck to draw her attention to the depredations of Oliver Leach, I will. But, so far as other matters go,-my walks in the Manor woods are ended! Yes, Nebbie!" and he gently patted the head of the faithful animal, who, with inborn sagacity instinctively guessing that his master was somewhat annoyed, was clambering with caressing forepaws against his knee. "Our rambles by the big elms and silvery birches and under the beautiful tall pines are over, Nebbie! and we shouldn't be human if we weren't just a trifle sorry! Sir Morton Pippitt is bad enough as a neighbour, but he's a good three miles off at Badsworth Hall, thank Heaven!-whereas Abbot's Manor is but a quarter of an hour's walk from this gate. We've had pleasant times in the dear old-fashioned gardens, Nebbie, you and I, but it's all over! The mistress of the Manor is coming home,-and I'm positively certain, Nebbie,-yes, old boy!-positively certain that we shall both detest her! ""

III

WHEN England's great Queen, Victoria the Good, was still enjoying her first happy years of wedded life, and society, under her gentle sway, was less ostentatious and much more sincere in its code of ethics than it is nowadays, the village of St. Rest, together with the adjacent post-town of Riversford, enjoyed considerable importance in county. chronicles. Very great 'county personages' were daily to be seen comporting themselves quite simply among their own tenantry, and the Riversford Hunt Ball annually gathered together a veritable galaxy of 'fair women and brave men' who loved their ancestral homes better than all the dazzle and movement of town, and who possessed for the most part that 'sweet content' which gives strength to the body and elasticity to the mind. There was then a natural gaiety and spontaneous cheerfulness in English country life that made such a life good for human happiness; and the jolly Squires who with their 'dames' kept open house and celebrated Harvest Home and Christmas Festival with all the buoyancy and vigour of a sane and healthful manhood undeteriorated by any sickly taint of morbid pessimism and indifferent inertia, were the beneficent rulers of a merrier rural population than has ever been seen since their day. Squire Vancourt the elder, grandfather of the present heiress of Abbot's Manor, had been a splendid specimen of the fine old English gentleman, all of the olden time,' and his wife, one of the handsomest, as well as one of the kindest-hearted women that ever lived, had been justly proud of her husband, devoted to her children, and a true friend and benefactress to the neighbourhood. Her four sons, two of whom were twins, all great strapping lads, built on their vigorous father's model, were considered the best-looking young men in the county, and by their fond mother were judged as the best-hearted; but, as it often happens, Nature was freakish in their regard, and turned them all out wild colts of a baser breed than might have been expected from their unsullied parentage. The eldest took to hard drinking and was killed at steeple-chasing; the second

was drowned while bathing; one of the twins, named Freder ick, the younger by a few minutes, after nearly falling into unnameable depths of degradation by gambling with certain 'noble and exalted' personages of renown, saved himself, as it were, by the skin of his teeth, through marriage with a rich American girl whose father was blessed with unlimited oil-mines. He was thereby enabled to wallow in wealth with an impaired digestion and shattered nervous power, while capricious Fate played him her usual trick in her usual way by denying him any heirs to his married millions. His firstborn brother, Robert, wedded for love, and chose as his mate a beautiful girl without a penny, whose grace and charm had dazzled the London world of fashion for about two seasons, and she had died at the age of twenty in giving birth to her first child, the girl whom her father had named Maryllia.

All these chances and changes of life, however, occurring to the leading family of the neighbourhood had left very little mark on St. Rest, which drowsed under the light shadow of the eastern hills by its clear flowing river, very much as it had always drowsed in the old days, and very much as it would always do even if London and Paris were consumed by unsuspected volcanoes. The memory of the first 'old Squire,'-who died peacefully in his bed all alone, his wife having passed away two years before him, and his two living twin sons being absent, was frequently mixed with stories of the other 'old Squire' Robert, the elder twin, who was killed in the hunting field, and indeed it often happened that some of the more ancient and garrulous villagers were not at all sure as to which was which. The Manor had been shut up for ten years, the Manor 'family' had not been heard of during all that period, and the tenantry's recollection of their late landlord, as well as of his one daughter, was more vague and confused than authentic. The place had been 'managed' and the cottage rents collected by the detested agent Oliver Leach, a fact which did not sweeten such remembrance of the Vancourts as still existed in the minds of the people.

However, nothing in the general aspect and mental attitude of the village had altered very much since the early thirties, except the church. That from a mere ruin, had under John Walden's incumbency become a gem of architecture, so unique and perfect as to be the wonder and admiration of all who beheld it, and whereas in the early Victorian reign a few people stopped at Riversford because it was a county town and because there was an inn there where they could put up their

horses, so a few people now went to St. Rest, because there was a church there worth looking at. They came by train to Riversford, where the railway line stopped, and then took carriage or cycled the seven miles between that town and St. Rest to see the church; and having seen it, promptly went back again. For one of the great charms of the little village hidden under the hills was that no tourist could stay a night in it, unless he or she took one spare room- -there was only oneat the small public-house which sneaked away up round a corner of the street under an archway of ivy, and pushed its old gables through the dark enshrouding leaves with a halfsurprised, half-propitiatory air, as though somewhat ashamed of its own existence. With the exception of this one room in this one public-house, there was no accommodation for visitors. Never will the rash cyclist who ventured once to appeal to the sexton's wife for rooms in her cottage, forget the brusqueness of his reception:

"Rooms!" And Mrs. Frost, setting her arms well akimbo, surveyed the enquirer scornfully through an open doorway, rendered doubly inviting by the wealth of roses clambering round it. 66 Be off, young man! Where was you a-comin' to? D'ye think a woman wi' fifteen great boys and girls in an' out of the 'ouse all day, 'as rooms for payin' guests!" And here Mrs. Frost, snorting at the air in irrepressible disdain, actually snapped her fingers in her would-be lodger's face. "Rooms indeed! Go to Brighting!"

Whereupon the abashed wheelman went, whether to Brighton, as the irate lady suggested, or to a warmer place unmentionable, history sayeth not. But St. Rest remained, as its name implied, restful,-and the barbaric yell of the cheap tripper, together with the equally barbaric scream of the cheap tripper's young lady' echoed chiefly through modernised and vulgarised Riversford, where there were tea-rooms and stuffy eating-houses and bad open-air concerts, such as trippers and their 'ladies' delight in,—and seldom disturbed the tranquil charm of the tiny medieval village dear to a certain few scholars, poets and antiquarians who, through John Walden, had gradually become acquainted with this priceless bit' as they termed it, of real 'old' England and who almost feared to mention its existence even in a whisper, lest it should be swarmed over' by enquiring Yankees, searching for those everlasting ancestors who all managed so cleverly to cross the sea together in one boat, the Mayflower.

There is something truly pathetic as well as droll in the

anxiety of every true American to prove himself or herself an offshoot from some old British root of honour or nobility. It would be cruel to laugh at this instinct, for after all it is only the passionate longing of the Prodigal Son who, having eaten of the husks that the swine did eat, experienced such an indigestion at last, that he said 'I will arise and go to my father.' And it is quite possible that an aspiring Trans-Atlantic millionaire yearning for descent more than dollars, would have managed to find tracks of a Mayflower pedigree in St. Rest, a place of such antiquity as to be able to boast a chivalric 'roll of honour' once kept in the private museum at Badsworth Hall before the Badsworth family became extinct, but now, thanks to Walden, rescued from the modern clutch of the Hall's present proprietor, Sir Morton Pippitt, and carefully preserved in an iron box locked up in the church, along with other documents of value belonging to the neighbourhood. On this were inscribed the names of such English gentlemen once resident in the district, who had held certain possessions in France at the accession of Henry II. in 1154. Besides the 'roll of honour' there were other valuable records having to do with the Anglo-French campaigns in the time of King John, and much concerning those persons of St. Rest and Riversford who took part in the Wars of the Barons.

Whatever there was of curious or interesting matter respecting the village and its surroundings had been patiently ferreted out by John Walden, who had purchased the living partly because he knew it to be a veritable mine for antiquarian research, and one likely to afford him inexhaustible occupation and delight. But there were, of course, other reasons for his settling down in so remote a spot far from the busy haunts of men,-reasons which, to his own mind, were perfectly natural and simple, though on account of his innate habit of reticence, and disinclination to explain his motives to others, they were by some supposed to be mysterious. In his youth he had been one of the most brilliant and promising of University scholars, and all those who had assisted to fit him for his career in the Church, had expected great things of him. Some said he would be a Bishop before he was thirty; others considered that he would probably content himself with being the most intellectual and incisive preacher of his time. But he turned out to be neither one nor the other. A certain Henry Arthur Brent, his fellow student at College and five years his senior, had, with apparent ease, outstripped him in the race for honour, though lacking in all such exceptional