I had been at Thornleigh a little more than a week, when Mr. Darrell one morning proposed a drive to a place called Cumber Priory, which was one of the show-houses of the neighbourhood.  It was a very old place, he said, and had been one of the earliest monastic settlements in that part of the country.  Milly and her father and her cousin had been there a great many times, and the visit was proposed for the gratification of Mrs. Darrell and myself.

She assented graciously, as she always did to every proposition of her husband’s, and we started soon after breakfast in the barouche, with Julian Stormont on horseback.  The drive was delightful; for, after leaving the hilly district about Thornleigh, our road lay through a wood, where the trees were of many hundred years’ growth.  I recognised groups of oak and beech that I had seen among the sketches in Milly’s portfolio.

On the other side of the wood we came to some dilapidated-looking gates, with massive stone escutcheons on the great square pillars.  There was a lodge, but it was evidently unoccupied, and Mr. Darrell’s footman got down from the box to open the gates.  Within we made the circuit of a neglected lawn, divided from a park by a sunk fence, across which some cattle stared at us in a lazy manner as we drove past them.  The house was a long low building with heavily mullioned windows, and was flanked by gothic towers.  Most of the windows had closed shutters, and the place had altogether a deserted look.

‘The Priory has not been occupied for several years,’ Mr. Darrell said, as if in answer to my thoughts as I looked up at the closed windows.  ’The family have been too poor to live in it in anything like their old state.  There is only one member of the old family remaining now, and he leads a wandering kind of life abroad, I believe.’

‘What has made them so poor?’ asked Mrs. Darrell.

‘Extravagant habits, I suppose,’ answered her husband, with an expressive shrug of the shoulders.  ’The Egertons have always been a wild race.’

‘Egerton!’ Mrs. Darrell repeated; ’I thought the name of these people was Cumber.’

’No; Cumber is only the name of the place.  It has been in the Egerton family for centuries.’

‘Indeed!’

I was seated exactly opposite her, and I was surprised by the strange startled look in her face as she repeated the name of Egerton.  That look passed away in the next moment, and left her with her usual air of languid indifference; a placid kind of listlessness which harmonised very well with her pale complexion and delicate features.  She was not a woman from whom one expected much animation.

The low iron-studded door of the Priory was opened by a decent-looking old woman of that species which seems created expressly for the showing of old houses.  She divined our errand at once, and as soon as we were in the hall, began her catalogue of pictures and curiosities in the usual mechanical way, while we looked about us, always fixing our eyes on the wrong object, and more bewildered than enlightened by her description of the chief features of the place.