Only once before in his life had he been within the park—­on one of the hunts of his boyhood, the famous occasion when the fox, started on the other side of the river, had made straight for Threlfall, and, the gate closing the private foot-bridge having been, by a most unusual chance, left open, had slipped thereby into the park, with the hounds in full cry after him.  The hunt had momentarily paused, and then breaking loose from all control had dashed through the yard of the Home Farm in joyous pursuit, while the enraged Melrose, who with Dixon and another man had rushed out with sticks to try and head them back, had to confine himself and his followers to manning the enclosure round the house—­impotent spectators of the splendid run through the park—­which had long remained famous in Cumbrian annals.  Tatham was then a lad of fourteen, mounted on one of the best of ponies, and he well remembered the mad gallop which had carried him past the Tower, and the tall figure of its furious master.  The glee, the malicious triumph of the moment ran through his pulses again as he thought of it.

A short-lived triumph indeed, as far as the hunt was concerned; for the building of the ten-foot wall had followed, and Melrose’s final breach with the gentry of his county.  Never since had Tatham set foot in the Ogre’s demesne; and he examined every feature of it with the most lively interest.  The dilapidated buildings of the Home Farm reminded him of a lawsuit brought by a former tenant against his landlord, in which a story of mean and rapacious dealing on the part of Melrose, toward a decent though unfortunate man, had excited the disgust of the whole countryside.  Melrose had never since been able to find a tenant for the farm, and the bailiff he had put in was a drunken creature whose mismanagement of it was notorious.  Such doings by a man so inhumanly shrewd as Melrose in many of his affairs could only be accounted for by the combination in him of miserly dislike of spending, with a violent self-will.  Instances, however, had been known when to get his own way, or gain a sinister advantage over an opponent, Melrose had been willing to spend extravagantly.

After passing the farm, Tatham pressed on eagerly, expecting the first sight of the house.  The dense growth of shrub and creeper, which had been allowed to grow up around it, the home according to the popular legend of uncanny multitudes of owls and bats, tickled imagination; and Tatham had often brought a field-glass to bear upon the house from one of the neighbouring hills.  But as he turned the last corner of the drive he drew up his horse in amazement.

The jungle was gone—! and the simple yet stately architecture of the house stood revealed in the summer sunshine.  In the west wing, indeed, the windows were still shuttered, and many of them overgrown with ivy; but the dingy thickets of laurel and yew were everywhere shorn away; and to the east all the windows stood free and open.  Moreover, two men were at work in the front garden, clearing the flagged paths, traced in the eighteenth century, from encumbrance, and laying down turf in a green circle round one of the small classical fountains that stood on either side of the approach.