They stopped by direction at a gate, and behind it was a green cluster of lilac bushes, which lined the walk to the big plum-colored house which Lionel Carvel had built.  Virginia remembered that down this walk on a certain day in June, a hundred years agone, Richard Carvel had led Dorothy Manners.

They climbed the steps, tottering now with age and disuse, and Virginia playfully raised the big brass knocker, brown now, that Scipio had been wont to polish until it shone.  Stephen took from his pocket the clumsy key that General Carvel had given him, and turned it in the rusty lock.  The door swung open, and Virginia stood in the hall of her ancestors.

It was musty and damp this day as the day when Richard had come back from England and found it vacant and his grandfather dead.  But there, at the parting of the stairs, was the triple-arched window which he had described.  Through it the yellow afternoon light was flooding now, even as then, checkered by the branches in their first fringe of green.  But the tall clock which Lionel Carvel used to wind was at Calvert House, with many another treasure.

They went up the stairs, and reverently they walked over the bare floors, their footfalls echoing through the silent house.  A score of scenes in her great-grandfather’s life came to Virginia.  Here was the room—­the cornet one at the back of the main building, which looked out over the deserted garden—­that had been Richard’s mother’s.  She recalled how he had stolen into it on that summer’s day after his return, and had flung open the shutters.  They were open now, for their locks were off.  The prie-dieu was gone, and the dresser.  But the high bed was there, stripped of its poppy counterpane and white curtains; and the steps by which she had entered it.

And next they went into the great square room that had been Lionel Carvel’s, and there, too, was the roomy bed on which the old gentleman had lain with the gout, while Richard read to him from the Spectator.  One side of it looked out on the trees in Freshwater Lane; and the other across the roof of the low house opposite to where the sun danced on the blue and white waters of the Chesapeake.

“Honey,” said Virginia, as they stood in the deep recess of the window, “wouldn’t it be nice if we could live here always, away from the world?  Just we two!  But you would never be content to do that,” she said, smiling reproachfully.  “You are the kind of man who must be in the midst of things.  In a little while you will have far more besides me to think about.”

He was quick to catch the note of sadness in her voice.  And he drew her to him.

“We all have our duty to perform in the world, dear,” he answered.  “It cannot be all pleasure.”

“You—­you Puritan!” she cried.  “To think that I should have married a Puritan!  What would my great-great-great-great-grandfather say, who was such a stanch Royalist?  Why, I think I can see him frowning at me now, from the door, in his blue velvet goat and silverlaced waistcoat.”