For in this thankfulness of awakening from the hellish nightmare of the Terror, Mr. Verity’s facile imagination tended to run to another extreme.  With all the seriousness of which he was capable he canvassed the notion of a definite retirement from the world.  Public movements, political and social experiments ceased to attract him.  His appetite for helping to make the wheels of history go round had been satisfied to the point of nausea.  All he desired was tranquillity and repose.  He was free of domestic obligations and close family ties.  He proposed to remain so—­philosophy his mistress, science his hand-maid, literature his pastime, books (remembering the bitter sorrows of the tumbril and scaffold in Paris) in future, his closest friends.

But, unfortunately, though the great church in all its calm grave, beauty still held the heart the fair landscape, the monastery, which might have sheltered his renunciation, had been put to secular uses or fallen into ruin long years ago.  If he proposed to retire from the world, he must himself provide suitable environment.  Marychurch Abbey, at the end of the eighteenth century, had very certainly nothing to offer him under that head.

And then, with a swiftness of conception and decision possible only to mercurial-minded persons, his thought darted back to Tandy’s, that unkempt, morally malodorous back-of-beyond and No Man’s Land.  Its vacant whitewashed countenance and long-eared chimney-stacks had welcomed him, if roughly and grudgingly, to England and to peace.  Was he not in some sort thereby in debt to Tandy’s bound by gratitude to the place?  Should he not buy it—­his private fortune being considerable—­and there plant his hermitage?  Should he not renovate and transform it, redeeming it from questionable uses, by transporting thither, not himself only but his fine library, his famous herbarium, his cabinets of crystals, of coins, and of shells?  The idea captivated him.  He was weary of destruction, having seen it in full operation and practised on the gigantic scale.  Henceforth he would devote all the energy he possessed to construction—­on however modest and private a one—­to a building up, as personal protest against much lately witnessed wanton and chaotic pulling-down.

In prosecution of which purpose, hopeful once more and elate, bobbing merrily cork-like upon the surface of surrounding circumstance—­although lamentably deficient, for the moment, in raiment befitting his position and his purse—­Mr. Verity spent two days at the Stag’s Head, in Marychurch High Street.  He made enquiries of all and sundry regarding the coveted property; and learned, after much busy investigation that the village, and indeed the whole Hundred of Deadham, formed an outlying and somewhat neglected portion of his acquaintance, Lord Bulparc’s Hampshire estate.

Here was solid information to go upon.  Greatly encouraged, he took the coach to Southampton, and thence up to town; where he interviewed first Lord Bulparc’s lawyers and then that high-coloured, free-living nobleman himself.