his present wealth.  He boasted of neither; he was disturbed by neither.  Standing alone, a stranger, for the first time in an assemblage of distinguished and titled men and women, he betrayed no consciousness; surrounded for the first time by objects which he knew his wealth could not buy, he showed the most unmistakable indifference,—­the indifference of temperament.  The ladies vied with each other to attack this unimpressible nature,—­this profound isolation from external attraction.  They followed him about, they looked into his dark, melancholy eyes; it was impossible, they thought, that he could continue this superb acting forever.  A glance, a smile, a burst of ingenuous confidence, a covert appeal to his chivalry would yet catch him tripping.  But the melancholy eyes that had gazed at the treasures of Ashley Grange and the opulent ease of its guests without kindling, opened to their first emotion,—­wonder!  At which Lady Elfrida, who had ingenuously admired him, hated him a little, as the first step towards a kindlier feeling.

The next day, having declared his intention of visiting Ashley Church, and, as frankly, his intention of going there alone, he slipped out in the afternoon and made his way quietly through the park to the square ivied tower he had first seen.  In this tranquil level length of the wood there was the one spot, the churchyard, where, oddly enough, the green earth heaved into little billows as if to show the turbulence of that life which those who lay below them had lately quitted.  It was a relief to the somewhat studied and formal monotony of the well-ordered woodland,—­every rood, of which had been paced by visitors, keepers, or poachers,—­to find those decrepit and bending tombstones, lurching at every angle, or deeply sinking into the green sea of forgetfulness around them.  All this, and the trodden paths of the villagers towards that common place of meeting, struck him as being more human than anything he had left behind him at the Grange.

He entered the ivy-grown porch and stared for a moment at the half-legal official parochial notices posted on the oaken door,—­his first obtrusive intimation of the combination of church and state,—­and hesitated.  He was not prepared to find that this last resting-place of his people had something to do with taxes and tithes, and that a certain material respectability and security attended his votive sigh.  God and the reigning sovereign of the realm preserved a decorous alliance in the royal arms that appeared above the official notices.  Presently he pushed open the door gently and entered the nave.  For a moment it seemed to him as if the arched gloom of the woods he had left behind was repeated in the dim aisle and vaulted roof; there was an earthy odor, as if the church itself, springing from the fertilizing dust below, had taken root in the soil; the chequers of light from the faded stained-glass windows fell like the flicker of leaves on the pavement.  He