It was in the town, yet nothing town-like.  No sooty smother hung above the house-tops and smirched the garden leafage; no tramp of crowds, no clatter of hot-wheel traffic, sounded from the streets hard by.  But at hours familiar, bidding to task or pleasure or repose, the music of the grey belfries floated overhead; a voice from the old time, an admonition of mortality in strains sweet to the ear of childhood.  Harvey had but to listen, and the days of long ago came back to him.  Above all, when at evening rang the curfew.  Stealing apart to a bowered corner of the garden, he dreamed himself into the vanished years, when curfew-time was bed-time, and a hand with gentle touch led him from his play to that long sweet slumber which is the child’s new birth.

Basil Morton was one of three brothers, the youngest.  His father, a corn-factor, assenting readily to his early inclination for the Church, sent him from Greystone Grammar-School to Cambridge, where Basil passed creditably through the routine, but in no way distinguished himself.  Having taken his degree, he felt less assured of a clerical vocation, and thought that the law might perhaps be more suitable to him.  Whilst he thus wavered, his father died, and the young man found that he had to depend upon himself for anything more than the barest livelihood.  He decided, after all, for business, and became a partner with his eldest brother, handling corn as his father and his grandfather had done before him.  At eight and twenty he married, and a few years afterwards the elder Morton’s death left him to pursue commerce at his own discretion.  Latterly the business had not been very lucrative, nor was Basil the man to make it so; but he went steadily on in the old tracks, satisfied with an income which kept him free from care.

‘I like my trade,’ he said once to Harvey Rolfe; ’it’s clean and sweet and useful.  The Socialist would revile me as a middleman; but society can’t do without me just yet, and I ask no more than I fairly earn.  I like turning over a sample of grain; I like the touch of it, and the smell of it.  It brings me near to the good old Mother Earth, and makes me feel human.’

His house was spacious, well built, comfortable.  The furniture, in great part, was the same his parents had used; solid mahogany, not so beautiful as furniture may be made, but serviceable, if need be, for another fifty years.  He had a library of several thousand volumes, slowly and prudently collected, representing a liberal interest in all travail of the mind, and a special taste for the things of classical antiquity.  Basil Morton was no scholar in the modern sense, but might well have been described by the old phrase which links scholar with gentleman.  He lived by trade, but trade did not affect his life.  The day’s work over, he turned, with no feeling of incongruity, to a page of Thucydides, of Tacitus, or to those less familiar authors who lighted his favourite wanderings