and I rather hoped he wouldn't turn up too soon.

I sat down on a stone and lit a cigarette. As soon as I had done
it, it struck me as a puerile and portentous thing to do, with
that great blind house looking down at me, and all the empty
avenues converging on me. It may have been the depth of the
silence that made me so conscious of my gesture. The squeak of
my match sounded as loud as the scraping of a brake, and I almost
fancied I heard it fall when I tossed it onto the grass. But
there was more than that: a sense of irrelevance, of littleness,
of childish bravado, in sitting there puffing my cigarette-smoke
into the face of such a past.

I knew nothing of the history of Kerfol--I was new to Brittany,
and Lanrivain had never mentioned the name to me till the day
before--but one couldn't as much as glance at that pile without
feeling in it a long accumulation of history. What kind of
history I was not prepared to guess: perhaps only the sheer
weight of many associated lives and deaths which gives a kind of
majesty to all old houses. But the aspect of Kerfol suggested
something more--a perspective of stern and cruel memories
stretching away, like its own grey avenues, into a blur of
darkness.

Certainly no house had ever more completely and finally broken
with the present. As it stood there, lifting its proud roofs and
gables to the sky, it might have been its own funeral monument.
"Tombs in the chapel? The whole place is a tomb!" I reflected.
I hoped more and more that the guardian would not come. The
details of the place, however striking, would seem trivial