About half a mile up the lane, beyond the vicarage, stood an old iron
gateway leading into a park. It was flanked by square red-brick columns,
upon whose summits two stone griffins, "rampant," had looked each other
in the face for the space of some two hundred years or so, peering grimly
over the tops of the shields against which they stood on end, upon which
all the family arms and quarterings of the Kynastons had become softly
coated over by an indistinct veil of gray-green moss.

Vera turned in at this gate, nodding to the woman at the lodge within,
who looked out for a minute at her as she passed. It was her daily walk,
for Kynaston was uninhabited and empty, and any one was free to wander
unreproved among its chestnut glades, or to stand and gossip to its
ancient housekeeper in the great bare rooms of the deserted house.

Vera did so often. The square, red-brick building, with its stone
copings, the terrace walk before the windows, the peacocks sunning
themselves before the front door, the fountain plashing sleepily in the
stone basin, the statues down the square Italian garden--all had a
certain fascination for her dreamy poetical nature. Then turning in at
the high narrow doorway, whose threshold Mrs. Eccles, the housekeeper,
had long ago given her free leave to cross, she would stroll through the
deserted rooms, touching the queer spindle-legged furniture with gentle
reverent fingers, gazing absorbedly at the dark rows of family portraits,
and speculating always to herself what they had been like, these dead and
gone Kynastons, who had once lived and laughed, and sorrowed and died, in
the now empty rooms, where nothing was left of them save those dim and
faded portraits, and where the echo of her own footsteps was the only
sound in the wilderness of the carpetless chambers where once they had
reigned supreme.