since crumbled into dust had planted those old oaks and walnuts, that
still donned their green robes in summer, and shed them in the autumn,
to stand great skeletons through the winter months, awaiting the
resurrection of the spring.

There lay upon the place and its surroundings a burden of dead lives,
intangible, but none the less real. The air was thick with memories,
as suggestive as the grey dust in a vault. Even in the summer, in the
full burst of nature revelling in her strength, the place was sad. But
in the winter, when the wind came howling through the groaning trees,
and drove the grey scud across an ashy sky, when the birds were dumb,
and there were no cattle on the sodden lawn, its isolated melancholy
was a palpable thing.

That hoary house might have been a gateway of the dim land we call the
Past, looking down in stony sorrow on the follies of those who so soon
must cross its portals, and, to the wise who could hear the lesson,
pregnant with echoes of the warning voices of many generations.

Here it was that Angela grew up to womanhood.



Some nine and a half years had passed from the date of the events
described in the foregoing pages, when one evening Mr. Fraser
bethought him that he had been indoors all day, and proposed reading
till late that night, and that therefore he had better take some
exercise.

A tall and somewhat nervous-looking man, with dark eyes, a sensitive