here's the pony."

Susan held her.

"You're really going to the Tower?"

"I am. It's mean of me. When you hate a man, you oughtn't to go to his
house. But I can't help it. I'm so curious."

"Yes, but not about Mr. Melrose," said Susan slowly.

Lydia flushed suddenly from brow to chin.

"Goose! let me go."

Susan let her go, and then stood a while, absorbed, looking at the
mysterious Tower. Her power of visualization was uncannily strong; it
amounted almost to second sight. She seemed to be in the Tower--in one of
its locked and shuttered rooms; to be looking at a young man stretched
on a sofa--a wizardlike figure in a black cloak standing near--and in the
doorway, Lydia entering, bringing the light on her fair hair....

VIII

Tatham had to open the gate of Threlfall Park for himself. The lodge
beside it, of the same date and architecture as the house, had long
ceased to be inhabited. The gate was a substantial iron affair, and
carried a placard, peremptorily directing the person entering to close it
behind him. And on either side of it, the great wall stretched away with
which, some ten years before this date, Melrose, at incredible cost, had
surrounded the greater part of his property, in consequence of a quarrel
with the local hunt, and to prevent its members from riding over his
land.

Tatham, having carefully shut the gate, rode slowly through the park,
casting a curious and hostile eye over the signs of parsimonious neglect
which it presented. Sheep and cattle were feeding in part of it; part of
it was standing for hay; and everywhere the fences were ruinous, and the
roads grass-grown. It was, Tatham knew, let out to various small farmers,
who used it as they pleased. As to the woods which studded it, "the man
must be a simple fool who could let them get into such a state!" Tatham
prided himself hugely on the admirable forestry with which the large
tracts of woodland in his own property were managed. But then he paid a
proper salary to a trained forester, a man of education. Melrose's woods,
with their choked and ruined timber, were but another proof that a miser
is, scientifically, only a species of idiot.

Only once before in his life had he been within the park--on one of the
hunts of his boyhood, the famous occasion when the fox, started on the
other side of the river, had made straight for Threlfall, and, the gate
closing the private foot-bridge having been, by a most unusual chance,
left