instructions to Cecilia and excuses to himself, remained still and
gazing on the old tower thus abruptly obtruded on his view.

Though no learned antiquarian like his father, Kenelm had a strange
fascinating interest in all relics of the past; and old gray towers,
where they are not church towers, are very rarely to be seen in England.
All around the old gray tower spoke with an unutterable mournfulness
of a past in ruins: you could see remains of some large Gothic building
once attached to it, rising here and there in fragments of deeply
buttressed walls; you could see in a dry ditch, between high ridges,
where there had been a fortified moat: nay, you could even see where
once had been the bailey hill from which a baron of old had dispensed
justice. Seldom indeed does the most acute of antiquarians discover
that remnant of Norman times on lands still held by the oldest of
Anglo-Norman families. Then, the wild nature of the demesne around;
those ranges of sward, with those old giant oak-trunks, hollowed within
and pollarded at top,--all spoke, in unison with the gray tower, of a
past as remote from the reign of Victoria as the Pyramids are from the
sway of the Viceroy of Egypt.

"Let us turn back," said Miss Travers; "my father would not like me to
stay here."

"Pardon me a moment. I wish my father were here; he would stay till
sunset. But what is the history of that old tower? a history it must
have."

"Every home has a history, even a peasant's hut," said Cecilia. "But do
pardon me if I ask you to comply with my father's request. I at least
must turn back."

Thus commanded, Kenelm reluctantly withdrew his gaze from the ruin and
regained Cecilia, who was already some paces in return down the lane.

"I am far from a very inquisitive man by temperament," said Kenelm, "so
far as the affairs of the living are concerned. But I should not care to
open a book if I had no interest in the past. Pray indulge my curiosity
to learn something about that old tower. It could not look more
melancholy and solitary if I had built it myself."

"Its most melancholy associations are with a very recent past," answered
Cecilia. "The tower, in remote times, formed the keep of a castle
belonging to the most ancient and once the most powerful family in these
parts. The owners were barons who took active share in the Wars of the
Roses. The last of them sided with Richard III., and after the battle
of Bosworth the title was attainted,