Not another word of all this strange history could Alan decipher, so
with aching eyes he shut up the stained and tattered volume, and at
last, just as the day was breaking, fell asleep.

At eleven o'clock on that same morning, for he had slept late, Alan rose
from his breakfast and went to smoke his pipe at the open door of the
beautiful old hall in Yarleys that was clad with brown Elizabethan
oak for which any dealer would have given hundreds of pounds. It was a
charming morning, one of those that comes to us sometimes in an English
April when the air is soft like that of Italy and the smell of the earth
rises like that of incense, and little clouds float idly across a sky
of tender blue. Standing thus he looked out upon the park where the elms
already showed a tinge of green and the ash-buds were coal black. Only
the walnuts and the great oaks, some of them pollards of a thousand
years of age, remained stark and stern in their winter dress.

Alan was in a reflective mood and involuntarily began to wonder how many
of his forefathers had stood in that same spot upon such April mornings
and looked out upon those identical trees wakening in the breath of
spring. Only the trees and the landscape knew, those trees which had
seen every one of them borne to baptism, to bridal and to burial. The
men and women themselves were forgotten. Their portraits, each in the
garb of his or her generation, hung here and there upon the walls of the
ancient house which once they had owned or inhabited, but who remembered
anything of them to-day? In many cases their names even were lost, for
believing that they, so important in their time, could never sink into
oblivion, they had not thought it necessary to record them upon their
pictures.