a narrow
ribbon scored by wheel-ruts along the noble drive. Parson Chichester
pulled up, and was about to dismount and open the gates for himself,
when he caught sight of a stranger coming afoot down the drive; and the
stranger, at the same moment catching sight of the dog-cart, waved a
hand and mended his pace to do this small service.

"Much obliged to you," nodded Parson Chichester pleasantly, after a
sharp and curious scrutiny. For the stranger was a parson too by his
dress--a tall, elderly man with grey side-whiskers and a hard, square
mouth like the slit of a letter-box. The clergy are always curious
about one another by a sort of freemasonry, and Parson Chichester knew
every beneficed clergyman in the diocese and most of the unbeneficed.
But who could this be? And what might be his business at Meriton, of
all places?

The stranger acknowledged his thanks with a slight wave of the hand.

"A fine day. I am happy to have been of service."

It was curious. Each paused for a second or so as if on the point of
asking a question; each waited for the other to speak; then, as nothing
came of it, each bowed again, and thus awkwardly they parted.

Parson Chichester drove on with a pucker between the eyebrows and a
humorous twitch in the corners of his mouth. So when two pedestrians,
strangers, meet and politely attempt to draw aside but with misdirected
_chasses_ that leave them still confronting one another, they disengage
at length and go their ways between irritation and amusement.

Meriton, one of "the stately homes of England," is a structure in the
Palladian style, injudiciously built on the foundations of an older
house dating from the fifteenth century, when sites were chosen for the
sake of a handy supply of water, and with little regard to view or even
to sunshine. It occupies a cup of the hills, is backed by a dark
amphitheatre of evergreen trees, and looks across a narrow valley. The
farther slope rises abruptly, and has been converted into a park, so to
speak, against its will. The stream that flows down the valley bottom
has likewise been arrested by art and forced to form a lake with a
swannery; but neither lake nor swannery is entirely convincing. It was
not, however, its architect's fault that to Parson Chichester the place
looked much more stately than homelike, since every window in its really
noble facade was shuttered and sightless.

The great entrance porchway lay at the back of the