under the shelter of the trees, and then emerged upon a wide stretch of
smooth turf, across which they commanded a perfect view of the principal
front of the old house. It was a quadrangular building of the Elizabethan
period, very plainly built, and with no special beauty to recommend it to
the lover of the picturesque. Whatever charm of form it may have
possessed in the past had been ruthlessly extirpated by the modernisation
of the windows, which were now all of one size and form--a long gaunt
range of unsheltered casements staring blankly out upon the spectator.
There were no flower-beds, no terraced walks, or graceful flights of
steps before the house; only a bare grassplot, with a stiff line of tall
elms on each side, and a wide dry moat dividing it from the turf in the
park. Two lodges--ponderous square brick buildings with very small
windows, each the exact counterpart of the other, and a marvel of
substantial ugliness--kept guard over a pair of tall iron gates, about
six hundred yards apart, approached by stone bridges that spanned the
moat.

Captain Sedgewick rang a bell hanging by the side of one of these gates,
whereat there arose a shrill peal that set the rooks screaming in the
tall elms overhead. An elderly female appeared in answer to this summons,
and opened the gate in a slow mechanical way, without the faintest show
of interest in the people about to enter, and looking as if she would
have admitted a gang of obvious burglars with equal indifference.

"Rather a hideous style of place," said Gilbert, as they walked towards
the house; "but I think show-places, as a general rule, excel in
ugliness. I daresay the owners of them find a dismal kind of satisfaction
in considering the depressing influence their dreary piles of
bricks-and-mortar must exercise on the minds of strangers; may be a sort
of compensation for being obliged to live in such a gaol of a place."