sour by force of circumstances.

VII.

It chanced, one evening, that I was walking alone through the park. I
had been on foot to the village to send a telegram, which I had not
cared to trust to a servant. The weather had suddenly cleared, and there
had been a sharp frost in the morning; towards midday it had thawed a
little, but by the time it was dark everything was frozen hard again.
The moon was nearly full, and shone brightly upon the frozen grass,
casting queer shadows through the bare branches of the trees; it was
very cold, and I walked fast; the brittle, frozen mud of the road broke
beneath my feet with a creaking, crunching sound, and startled the deep
stillness. As I neared the house the moon was before me, and the mass of
buildings cast a dark shadow.

Carvel Place is like many old country houses in England; it is a typical
dwelling of its kind, irregular, yet imposing, and though it has no
plan, for it has been added to and enlarged, and in part rebuilt, it is
yet harmonious and of good proportion. I had often reflected that it was
too large for the use of the present family, and I knew that there must
be a great number of rooms in the house which were never opened; but no
one had ever proposed to show them to me, and I was not sufficiently
curious to ask permission to visit the disused apartments. I had
observed, however, that a wing of the building ran into an inclosure,
surrounded by a wall seven or eight feet high, against which were ranged
upon the one side a series of hot-houses, while another formed the back
of a covered tennis court. The third wall of the inclosure was covered
with a lattice, upon which fruit trees had been trained without any
great success, and I had noticed that the lattice now completely
covered an old oak door which led into the inclosure. I had never seen
the door open, but I remembered very well that it was uncovered the last
time I had been at Carvel Place.

When I reached the house I was no longer cold, and the night was so
clear and sparkling that I idly strolled round the great place,
wandering across the frozen lawn and through the winding paths of the
flower garden beyond, till I came to the wall I have described, and
stood still, half wondering why the door had been covered over with
fruit trees, as though no one would ever wish to enter the house from
that side. The space could hardly be so valuable for gardening purposes,
I thought, for the slender peach-t