“But I fear he is a dangerous friend for you, Gilbert,” exclaimed Marian, horrified by this glimpse of bachelor life.

“No, darling, I have never shared his wilder pleasures.  There are a few chosen spirits with whom he consorts at such times.  I believe this Sir David Forster is one of them.”

“Sir David has the reputation of leading rather a wild life in London,” said the Captain, “and of bringing a dissipated set down here every autumn.  Things have not gone well with him.  His wife, who was a very beautiful girl, and whom he passionately loved, was killed by a fall from her horse a few months after the birth of her first child.  The child died too, and the double loss ruined Sir David.  He used to spend the greater part of his life at Heatherly, and was a general favourite among the county people; but since that time he has avoided the place, except during the shooting season.  He has a hunting-box in the shires, and is a regular daredevil over a big country they tell me.”

They had reached the little gate opening from the wood into the park by this time.  There was not much difference in the aspect of the sylvan scene upon the other side of the fence.  Sir David’s domain had been a good deal neglected of late years, and the brushwood and brambles grew thick under the noble old trees.  The timber had not yet suffered by its owner’s improvidence.  The end of all things must have come for Sir David before he would have consented to the spoliation of a place he fondly loved, little as he had cared to inhabit it since the day that shattered all that was brightest and best in his life.

For some time Captain Sedgewick and his companions went along a footpath under the shelter of the trees, and then emerged upon a wide stretch of smooth turf, across which they commanded a perfect view of the principal front of the old house.  It was a quadrangular building of the Elizabethan period, very plainly built, and with no special beauty to recommend it to the lover of the picturesque.  Whatever charm of form it may have possessed in the past had been ruthlessly extirpated by the modernisation of the windows, which were now all of one size and form—­a long gaunt range of unsheltered casements staring blankly out upon the spectator.  There were no flower-beds, no terraced walks, or graceful flights of steps before the house; only a bare grassplot, with a stiff line of tall elms on each side, and a wide dry moat dividing it from the turf in the park.  Two lodges—­ponderous square brick buildings with very small windows, each the exact counterpart of the other, and a marvel of substantial ugliness—­kept guard over a pair of tall iron gates, about six hundred yards apart, approached by stone bridges that spanned the moat.

Captain Sedgewick rang a bell hanging by the side of one of these gates, whereat there arose a shrill peal that set the rooks screaming in the tall elms overhead.  An elderly female appeared in answer to this summons, and opened the gate in a slow mechanical way, without the faintest show of interest in the people about to enter, and looking as if she would have admitted a gang of obvious burglars with equal indifference.