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His road through the fields ran past Hawk's Hall, of which he observed with a thrill of dismay, that the blinds were drawn as though in it someone lay dead. There was no reason why he should have been dismayed, since he had heard that Isobel had gone away to somewhere in "Ameriky," as Mrs. Parsons had expressed it in a brief and illspelt letter, and that Sir John was living in town. Yet the sight depressed him still further with its suggestion of death, or of separation, which is almost as bad, for, be it remembered, he was at an age when such impressions come home.

After leaving the Hall with its blinded and shuttered windows, his quickest road to the Abbey House ran through the churchyard. Here the first thing that confronted him was a gigantic monument, of which the new marble glittered in the afternoon sun. It was a confused affair, and all he made out of it, without close examination, was a life-sized angel with an early-Victorian countenance, leaning against the broken stump of an oak tree and scattering from a basket, of the kind that is used to collect nuts or windfall apples, on to a sarcophagus beneath a profusion of marble roses, some of which seemed to have been arrested and frozen in mid-air. He glanced at the inscription in gold letters. It was "To the beloved memory of Lady Jane Blake, wife of Sir John Blake, Bart., J.P., and daughter of the Right Hon. The Earl of Lynfield, whose bereaved husband erected this monument--'Her husband ... praiseth her.'"