shoulder of a slope, through a thicket of rank rhododendrons, and
crossed what had once been a carriage drive, which ended in the
shadow of two gigantic holm-oaks.

"A house!" said Sophie, in a whisper. "A Colonial house!"

Behind the blue-green of the twin trees rose a dark-bluish brick
Georgian pile, with a shell-shaped fan-light over its pillared
door. The hound had gone off on his own foolish quests. Except
for some stir it the branches and the flight of four startled
magpies; there was neither life nor sound about the square house,
but it looked out of its long windows most friendlily.

"Cha-armed to meet you, I'm sure," said Sophie, and curtsied to
the ground. "George, this is history I can understand. We began
here." She curtsied again.

The June sunshine twinkled on all the lights. It was as though an
old lady, wise in three generations' experience, but for the
present sitting out, bent to listen to her flushed and eager
grandchild.

"I must look!" Sophie tiptoed to a window, and shaded her eyes
with her hand. "Oh, this room's half-full of cotton-bales--wool,
I suppose! But I can see a bit of the mantelpiece. George, do
come! Isn't that some one?"

She fell back behind her husband. The front door opened slowly,
to show the hound, his nose white with milk, in charge of an
ancient of days clad in a blue linen ephod curiously gathered on