Mark, who was by now growing tired of his own company in the guest-room, accepted Sir Charles’ invitation with alacrity; and they walked down from the Abbey to the village of Malford, which was situated at the confluence of the Mall and the Nodder, two diminutive tributaries of the Wey, which itself is not a mighty stream.

“A rather charming village, don’t you think?” said Sir Charles, pointing with his tasselled cane to a particularly attractive rose-hung cottage.  “It was lucky that the railway missed us by a couple of miles; we should have been festering with tin bungalows by now on any available land, which means on any land that doesn’t belong to me.  I don’t offer to show you the church, because I never enter it.”

Mark had paused as a matter of course by the lychgate, supposing that with a squire like Sir Charles the inside should be of unusual interest.

“My uncle most outrageously sold the advowson to the Simeon Trustees, it being the only part of my inheritance he could alienate from me, whom he loathed.  He knew nothing would enrage me more than that, and the result is that I’ve got a fellow as vicar who preaches in a black gown and has evening communion twice a month.  That is why I took such pleasure in planting a monastery in the parish; and if only that old time-server the Bishop of Silchester would licence a chaplain to the community, I should get my Sunday Mass in my own parish despite my uncle’s simeony, as I call it.  As it is with Burrowes away all the time raising funds, I don’t get a Mass at the Abbey and I have to go to the next parish, which is four miles away and appears highly undignified for the squire.”

“And you can’t get him out?” said Mark.

“If I did get him out, I should be afflicted with another one just as bad.  The Simeon Trustees only appoint people of the stamp of Mr. Choules, my present enemy.  He’s a horrid little man with a gaunt wife six feet high who beats her children and, if village gossip be true, her husband as well.  Now you can see Malford Place, which is let to Middlesborough, as I told you.”

Mark looked at the great Georgian house with its lawns and cedars and gateposts surmounted by stone wyverns.  He had seen many of these great houses in the course of his tramping; but he had never thought of them before except as natural features in the landscape; the idea that people could consider a gigantic building like that as much a home as the small houses in which Mark had spent his life came over him now with a sense of novelty.

“Ghastly affair, isn’t it?” said the owner contemptuously.  “I’d let it stand empty rather than live in it myself.  It reeks of my uncle’s medicine and echoes with his gouty groans.  Besides what is there in it that’s really mine?”