The Project Gutenberg EBook of The Paradise Mystery, by J. S. Fletcher

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Title: The Paradise Mystery

Author: J. S. Fletcher

Release Date: March, 2004 [EBook #5308]
Posting Date: June 11, 2009

Language: English

Character set encoding: ASCII

*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE PARADISE MYSTERY ***

THE PARADISE MYSTERY

By J. S. Fletcher

CHAPTER I. ONLY THE GUARDIAN

American tourists, sure appreciators of all that is ancient and
picturesque in England, invariably come to a halt, holding their breath
in a sudden catch of wonder, as they pass through the half-ruinous
gateway which admits to the Close of Wrychester. Nowhere else in England
is there a fairer prospect of old-world peace. There before their eyes,
set in the centre of a great green sward, fringed by tall elms and giant
beeches, rises the vast fabric of the thirteenth-century Cathedral, its
high spire piercing the skies in which rooks are for ever circling and
calling. The time-worn stone, at a little distance delicate as lacework,
is transformed at different hours of the day into shifting shades of
colour, varying from grey to purple: the massiveness of the great nave
and transepts contrasts impressively with the gradual tapering of
the spire, rising so high above turret and clerestory that it at last
becomes a mere line against the ether. In morning, as in afternoon, or
in evening, here is a perpetual atmosphere of rest; and not around the
great church alone, but in the quaint and ancient houses which fence in
the Close. Little less old than the mighty mass of stone on which their
ivy-framed windows look, these houses make the casual observer feel
that here, if anywhere in the world, life must needs run smoothly. Under
those high gables, behind those mullioned windows, in the beautiful
old gardens lying between the stone porches and the elm-shadowed lawn,
nothing, one would think, could possibly exist but leisured and pleasant
existence: even the busy streets of the old city, outside the crumbling
gateway, seem, for the moment, far off.

In one of the oldest of these houses, half hidden behind trees and
shrubs in a corner of the Close, three people sat at breakfast