bitted rustic bridges leaping high over the Drone.  You cannot see all the lodges of Warpington Towers from the line, which is a source of some regret to Mr. Pratt; but if he happens to be travelling with you he will point out two of them, chaste stucco Gothic erections with church windows, and inform you that the three others are on the northern and eastern sides, vaguely indicating the directions of Scotland and Ireland.

And the Drone, kept in order on your left by the low line of the Slumberleigh hills, will follow you and leave you, leave you and return all the way to Westhope.  You are getting out at Westhope, of course, if you are a Middleshire man; for Westhope is on the verge of Middleshire, and the train does not go any farther—­at least, it only goes into one of the insignificant counties which jostle each other to hold on to Middleshire, unknown Saharas, where passengers who oversleep themselves wake to find themselves cast away.

Westhope Abbey stands in its long, low meadows and level gardens, close to the little town, straggling red roof above red roof, up its steep cobbled streets.

Down the great central aisle you may walk on mossy stones between the high shafts of broken pillars under the sky.  God’s stars look down once more where the piety of man had for a time shut them out.  Through the slender tracery of what was once the east window, instead of glazed saint and crucifix, you may see the little town clasping its hill.

The purple clematis and the small lizard-like leaf of the ivy have laid tender hands on all that is left of that stately house of prayer.  The pigeons wheel round it, and nest in its niches.  The soft, contented murmur of bird praise has replaced the noise of bitter human prayer.  A thin wind-whipped grass holds the summit of the broken walls against all corners.  The fallen stones, quaintly carved with angel and griffin, are going slowly back year by year, helped by the rain and hindered by the frost, slowly back through the sod to the generations of human hands that held and hewed them, and fell to dust below them hundreds of years ago.  The spirit returns to the God who gave it, and the stone to the hand that fashioned it.

The adjoining monastery had been turned into a dwelling-house, without altering it externally, and it was here that Lord Newhaven loved to pass the summer months.  Into its one long upper passage all the many rooms opened, up white stone steps through arched doors, rooms which had once been monks’ dormitories, abbots’ cells, where Lady Newhaven and her guests now crimped their hair and slept under down quilts till noon.

It was this long passage, with its interminable row of low latticed windows, that Lord Newhaven was turning into a depository for the old English weapons which he was slowly collecting.  He was standing now gazing lovingly at them, drawing one finger slowly along an inlaid arquebus, when a yell from the garden made him turn and look out.