Between Monksland and the town of Northwold lay some four miles of
cliff, most of which had been portioned off in building lots, for
Northwold was what is called a "rising watering-place." About half-way
between the Abbey and this town stood Mr. Porson's mansion. In fact, it
was nothing but a dwelling like those about it, presenting the familiar
seaside gabled roofs of red tiles, and stucco walls decorated with sham
woodwork, with the difference that the house was exceedingly well built
and about four times as large as the average villa.

"Great heavens! what a place!" said the Colonel to himself as he halted
at the private gateway which opened on to the cliff and surveyed it
affronting sea and sky in all its naked horror. "Show me the house and
I will show you the man," he went on to himself; "but, after all, one
mustn't judge him too hardly. Poor Porson, he did not arrange his own
up-bringing or his ancestors. Hello! there he is.

"John, John, John!" he shouted at a stout little person clad in a black
alpaca coat, a straw hat, and a pair of spectacles, who was engaged in
sad contemplation of a bed of dying evergreens.

At the sound of that well-known voice the little man jumped as though he
had trodden on a pin, and turned round slowly, muttering to himself,

"Gracious! It's him!" an ungrammatical sentence which indicated
sufficiently how wide a niche in the temple of his mind was filled with
the image of his brother-in-law, Colonel Monk.

John Porson was a man of about six or eight and fifty, round-faced,
bald, with large blue eyes not unlike those of a china doll, and