with the burden of gentility upon their shoulders, found
themselves in a perilous state. All through England the smaller
gentry were ruined, for they had no trade save war, and they drew
their living from the work of others. On many a manor-house there
came evil times, and on none more than on the Manor of Tilford,
where for many generations the noble family of the Lorings had
held their home.

There was a time when the Lorings had held the country from the
North Downs to the Lakes of Frensham, and when their grim
castle-keep rising above the green meadows which border the River
Wey had been the strongest fortalice betwixt Guildford Castle in
the east and Winchester in the west. But there came that Barons'
War, in which the King used his Saxon subjects as a whip with
which to scourge his Norman barons, and Castle Loring, like so
many other great strongholds, was swept from the face of the land.
From that time the Lorings, with estates sadly curtailed, lived in
what had been the dower-house, with enough for splendor.

And then came their lawsuit with Waverley Abbey, and the
Cistercians laid claim to their richest land, with peccary,
turbary and feudal rights over the remainder. It lingered on for
years, this great lawsuit, and when it was finished the men of the
Church and the men of the Law had divided all that was richest of
the estate between them. There was still left the old manor-house
from which with each generation there came a soldier to uphold the
credit of the name and to show the five scarlet roses on the
silver shield where it had always been shown--in the van. There
were twelve bronzes in the little chapel where Matthew the priest
said mass every morning, all of men of the house of Loring. Two